ANIMAL AUTOMATISM.
CHAPTER I.
THE COURSE OF MODERN THOUGHT.
1. Modern Philosophy has moved along two increasingly divergent lines. One, traversed by Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Laplace, had for its goal the absolute disengagement of the physical from the mental, i. e. the objective from the subjective aspect of phenomena, so that the physical universe, thus freed from all the complexities of Feeling, might be interpreted in mechanical terms. As a preliminary simplification of the problem this was indispensable; only by it could the First Notion of primitive speculation be replaced by the Theoretic Conception of scientific speculation.[204] The early thinker inevitably invested all external objects with properties and qualities similar to those he assigned to human beings, and their actions he assigned to human motives. Sun, moon, and stars seemed living beings; flames, streams, and winds were supposed to be moved by feelings such as those known to move animals and men. Nor was any other conception then possible: men could only interpret the unknown by the known, and their standard of all action was necessarily drawn from their own actions. Not having analyzed Volition and Emotion, above all not having localized these in a neuro-muscular system, men could not suspect that the movements of planets and plants, and of streams and stones, had motors of a different kind from the movements of animals. The scientific conception of inert insensible Matter was only attained through a long education in abstraction; and is assuredly never attained by animals, or by savages. But no sooner were vital conditions recognized, than the difference between vital and mechanical movements emerged. When men learned that many of their own actions were unaccompanied either by Love or Hate, by Pleasure or Pain, and that many were unprompted by conscious intention, while others were unaccompanied by conscious sensation, they easily concluded that wherever the special conditions of Feeling were absent, the actions must have some other motors. Intelligence, Emotion, Volition, and Sensation being one by one stripped away from all but a particular class of bodies, nothing remained for the other bodies but insensible Matter and Motion. This was the Theoretic Conception which science substituted for the First Notion. It was aided by the observation of the misleading tendency of interpreting physical phenomena by the human standard, substituting our fancies in the place of facts, manipulating the order of the universe according to our imagination of what it might be, or ought to be. Hence the vigilance of the new school in suppressing everything pertaining to the subjective aspect of phenomena, and the insistance on a purely objective classification, so that by this means we might attain to a knowledge of things as they are. By thus withdrawing Life and Mind from Nature, and regarding the universe solely in the light of Motion and the laws of Motion, two great scientific ends were furthered, namely, a classification of conceptions, and a precision of terms. Objective phenomena made a class apart, and the great aim of research was to find a mathematical expression for all varieties under this class. Masses were conceived as aggregates of Atoms, and these were reduced to mathematical points. Forces were only different modes of Motion. All the numberless differences which perception recognized as qualities in things, were reduced to mere variations in quantity. Thus all that was particular and concrete became resolved by analysis into what was general and abstract. The Cosmos then only presented a problem of Mechanics.
2. During this evolution, the old Dualism (which conceived a material universe sharply demarcated from the mental universe) kept its ground, and attained even greater precision. The logical distinction between Matter and Mind was accepted as an essential distinction, i. e. representing distinct reals. There was on the one side a group of phenomena, Matter and Force; on the other side an unallied group, Feeling and Thought: between them an impassable gulf. How the two were brought into relation, each acting and reacting on the other, was dismissed as an “insoluble mystery”—or relegated to Metaphysics for such minds as chose to puzzle over questions not amenable to experiment. Physics, confident in the possession of mathematical and experimental methods which yielded definite answers to properly restricted questions, peremptorily refused to listen to any suggestion of the kind. And the career of Physics was so triumphant that success seemed to justify its indifference.
3. In our own day this analytical school has begun to extend its methods even to the mental group. Having reduced all the objective group to mathematical treatment, it now tries to bring the subjective group also within its range. Not only has there been more than one attempt at a mathematical Psychology; but also attempts to reduce Sensibility, in its subjective no less than in its objective aspect, to molecular movement. Here also the facts of Quality are translated into facts of Quantity; and all diversities of Feeling are interpreted as simply quantitative differences.
4. Thus far the one school. But while this Theoretic Conception stripped Nature of consciousness, motive, and passion, rendering it a mere aggregate of mathematical relations, a critical process was going on, which, analyzing the nature of Perception, was rapidly moving towards another goal. Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, directing their analysis exclusively to the subjective aspect of phenomena, soon broke down the barriers between the physical and mental, and gradually merged the former in the latter. Matter and its qualities, hitherto accepted as independent realities, existing where no Mind perceived them, were now viewed as the creations of Mind—their existence was limited to a state of the percipient. The old Dualism was replaced by Idealism. The Cosmos, instead of presenting a problem of Mechanics, now presented a problem of Psychology. Beginning with what are called the secondary qualities of Matter, the psychological analysis resolved these into modes of Feeling. “The heat which the vulgar imagine to be in the fire and the color they imagine in the rose are not there at all, but are in us—mere states of our organism.” Having gained this standing-place, there was no difficulty in extending the view from the secondary to the primary qualities. These also were perceptions, and only existed in the percipient. Nothing then remained of Matter save the hypothetical unknown x—the postulate of speculation. Kant seemed forever to have closed the door against the real Cosmos when he transformed it into a group of mental forms—Time, Space, Causality, Quantity, etc. He propounded what may be called a theory of mental Dioptrics whereby a pictured universe became possible, as Experience by its own a priori laws moulded itself into a consistent group of appearances, which produced the illusion of being a group of realities. He admitted, indeed, that by the operation of Causality we are compelled to believe in a Real underlying the appearances; but the very fact that this Causality is a subjective law, is proof, he said, of its not being an objective truth. Thus the aim of the mechanical conception was to free research from the misleading complexities of subjective adulterations, and view things as they are apart from their appearances; but this aim seemed illusory when Psychology showed that Time, Space, Matter, and Motion were themselves not objective reals except in so far as they represented subjective necessities; and that, in short, things are just what they appear, since it is only in the relation of external reals to internal feelings that objects exist for us.
5. Idealism has been the outcome of the psychological method. It has been of immense service in rectifying the dualistic conception, and in correcting the mechanical conception. It has restored the subjective factor, which the mechanical conception had eliminated. It has brought into incomparable clearness the fundamental fact that all our knowledge springs from, and is limited by, Feeling. It has shown that the universe represented in that knowledge, can only be a picture of the system of things as these exist in relation to our Sensibility. But equally with the mechanical conception it has erred by incomplete analysis. For a complete theory of the universe, or of any one phenomenon, those elementary conditions which analysis has provisionally set aside must finally be restored. When Quality is replaced by Quantity, this is an artifice of method, which does not really correspond with fact. The quality is the fact given in feeling, which we analytically refer to quantitative differences, but which can never be wholly resolved into them, since it must be presupposed throughout. One color, for example, may be distinguished from another as having more or fewer undulations; and so we may by abstraction, letting drop all qualitative characters, make a scale of undulations to represent the scale of colors. But this is an ideal figment. It is the representation of one series of feelings by another series of different feelings. No variation of undulations will really correspond with variation in color, unless we reintroduce the suppressed quality which runs through all color. Attempt to make one born blind feel, or even understand, Color by describing to him the kind of wave-movement which it is said to be, and the vanity of the effort will be manifest. Movement he knows, and varieties of movement as given in tactile and muscular sensations; but no combination and manipulation of such experiences can give him the specific sensation of Color. That is a purely subjective state, which he is incapable of experiencing, simply because one of the essential factors is absent. One set of objective conditions is present, but the other set (his sense-organ) is defective. Without the “greeting of the spirit” undulations cannot become colors (nor even undulations, for these also are forms of feeling). Besides the sense-organ there is needed the feeling of Difference, which is itself the product of past and present feelings. The reproduction of other colors, or other shades of color, is necessary to this perception of difference; and this involves the element of Likeness and Unlikeness between what is produced and reproduced. So that a certain mental co-operation is requisite even for the simplest perception of quality. In fact, psychological analysis shows that even Motion and Quantity, the two objective terms to which subjective Quality is reduced, are themselves Fundamental Signatures of Feeling;[205] so that here, as elsewhere, it is only by analytical artifice that the objective can be divorced from the subjective. Matter is for us the Felt; its Qualities are differences of Feeling.
6. Not that this result is to be interpreted as freeing our Theoretic Conception from its objective side, and landing us in Idealism, which suppresses the real universe. The denial of all reality apart from our minds, is a twofold mistake: it confounds the conception of general relations with particular relations, declaring that because the External in its relation to the sentient organism can only be what it is felt to be, therefore it can have no other relations to other individual reals. This is the first mistake. The second is the disregard of the constant presence of the objective real in every fact of Feeling: the Not-Self is emphatically present in every consciousness of Self.
The legitimate conclusion is neither that of Dualism nor of Idealism, but what I have named Reasoned Realism (Problems, Vol. I. p. 201), which reconciles Common Sense with Speculative Logic, by showing that although the truth of things (their Wahrheit) is just what we perceive in them (our Wahrnehmung), yet their reality is this, and much more than this. Things are what they are felt to be; and what they are thought to be, when thoughts are symbols of the perceptions. Idealism declares that they are nothing but this. It is against this nothing but that Common Sense protests; and the protest is justified by Reasoned Realism, which, taking a comprehensive survey of the facts, thus answers the idealist: “Your synthesis is imperfect, since it does not include all the data—notably it excludes the fact of an objective or Not-Self element in every feeling. You may, conceivably, regard the whole universe as nothing but a series of changes in your consciousness; but you cannot hope to convince me that I myself am simply a change in yourself, or that my body is only a fleeting image in your mind. Hence although I conclude that the Not-Self is to you, as to me, undivorceable from Self, inalienable from Feeling, in so far as it is felt, yet there must nevertheless be for both of us an existence not wholly coextensive with our own. My world may be my picture of it; your world may be your picture of it; but there is something common to both which is more than either—an existent which has different relations to each. You are not me, nor is the pictured Cosmos me, although I picture it. Looking at you and it, I see a vast whole of which you are a small part; and such a part I conclude myself to be. It is at once a picture and the pictured; at once subjective and objective. To me all your modes of existence are objective aspects, which, drawing from my own experience, I believe to have corresponding subjective aspects; so that your emotions, which to me are purely physical facts, are to you purely mental facts. And psychological analysis assures me that all physical facts are mental facts expressed in objective terms, and mental facts are physical facts expressed in subjective terms.”
7. But while Philosophy thus replaces the conceptions of Dualism and Idealism by the conception of the Two-fold Aspect, the special sciences in their analytical career have disregarded the problem altogether. The mechanical theory of the universe not only simplified research by confining itself solely to the objective aspect of phenomena, but by a further simplification set aside all vital and chemical relations, to deal exclusively with mechanical relations. In ascertaining the mathematical relations of the planetary system, no elucidation could possibly be gained from biological or chemical conceptions; the planets therefore were provisionally stripped of everything not mechanical. In systematizing the laws of motion, it was necessary to disengage the abstract relations from everything in any way resembling spontaneity, or extra-mechanical agency: Matter was therefore, by a bold fiction, declared to be inert, and its Motion regarded as something superadded from without.
7a. And this was indispensable for the construction of those ideal laws which are the objects of scientific research. Science, as we often say, is the systematization of Experience under the forms of ideal constructions. Experience implies Feeling, and certain fundamental Signatures, all reducible to the primary discernment of Likeness and Unlikeness. Hence Science is first a classification of qualities or discerned likenesses and differences; next a measurement of quantities of discerned likenesses and differences. Although measurement is itself a species of classification, it is distinguished by the adoption of a standard unit of comparison, which, being precise and unvarying, enables us to express the comparisons in precise and unvarying symbols. Whether the unit of length adopted be an inch, a foot, a yard, a mile, the distance of the earth from the sun, or the distances of the fixed stars, the quantities thus measured are symbols admitting of one invariable interpretation. The exactness of the mathematical sciences is just this precision and invariability of their symbols, and is not, as commonly supposed, the source of any superior certainty as to the facts. The classificatory sciences, which deal with qualities rather than with quantities, may be equally certain, and represent fuller knowledge, because involving more varied feelings, but they cannot pretend to exactness. Even on the quantitative side, certainty is not identical with exactness. I may be quite certain that one block of marble is larger than another—meaning that it affects me more voluminously—but I cannot know how much larger it is, without interpreting my feelings by the standard of quantity—the how-muchness as represented by that standard. The immense advantages of exact measurement need not be insisted on. The Biological Sciences, which are predominantly classificatory, can never rival the Cosmological Sciences in exactness; but they may reach a fuller knowledge; and their certainty will assume more and more the character of exactness as methods of measurement are applied to their classifications of qualities. The qualitative and quantitative aspects of phenomena are handled by the two great instruments, Logic and Mathematics, the second being only a special form of the first. These determine the general conceptions which are derived from our perceptions, and the whole constitute Experience.
8. What is the conclusion to which these considerations lead? It is that the separation of the quantitative from the qualitative aspect of phenomena—the objective mechanical from the subjective psychological—is a logical artifice indispensable to research; but it is only an artifice.[206] In pursuance of this artifice, each special science must be regarded as the search after special analytical results; and meanwhile this method should be respected, and no confusion of the boundaries between one science and another should be suffered. Mechanical problems must not be confused by the introduction of biological relations. Biological problems must not be restricted to mechanical relations. I do not mean that the mechanical relations present in biological phenomena are not to be sought, and, when found, to be expressed in mechanical terms; I mean that such an inquiry must be strictly limited to mechanical relations. Subjective relations are not to be denied, because they are provisionally set aside, in an inquiry into objective relations; but we must carefully distinguish which of the two orders we are treating of, and express each in its appropriate terms. This is constantly neglected. For example, nothing is more common than to meet such a phrase as this: “A sensory impression is transmitted as a wave of motion to the brain, and there being transformed into a state of consciousness, is again reflected as a motor impulse.”
The several sciences having attained certain analytical results, it remains for Philosophy to co-ordinate these into a doctrine which will furnish general conceptions of the World, Man, and Society. On the analytical side a mechanical theory of the universe might be perfected, but it would still only be a theory of mechanical relations, leaving all other relations to be expressed in other terms. We cannot accept the statement of Descartes that Nature is a vast mechanism, and Science the universal application of mathematics. The equation of a sphere, however valuable from a geometrical point of view, is useless as an explanation of the nature and properties of the spherical body in other relations. And so a complete theory of the mechanical relations of the organism, however valuable in itself, would be worthless in the solution of a biological problem, unless supplemented by all that mechanical terms are incompetent to express.
9. The course of biological speculation has been similar to the cosmological. It also began with a First Notion, which compendiously expressed the facts of Experience. Nor can any Theoretic Conception be finally adopted which does away with these facts, known with positive certainty, and popularly expressed in the phrase: “I have a body, and a soul.” We may alter the phrase either into “I am a body, and I am a soul”; or into, “My body is only the manifestation of my soul”; or, “My soul is only a function of my body”; but the fundamental experiences which are thus expressed are of absolute authority, no matter how they may be interpreted. That I have a body, or am a body, is not to be speculatively argued away. That I move my arm to strike the man who has offended me, or stretch out my hand to seize the fruit which I see, is unquestionable; that these movements are determined by these feelings, and are never thus effected unless thus determined, is also unquestionable. Here are two sets of phenomena, having well-marked differences of aspect; and they are grouped respectively under two general heads, Life and Mind. Life is assigned to the physical organism, or Body—all its phenomena are objective. Mind is assigned to the psychical organism, or Soul—all its phenomena are subjective. Although what is called my Body is shown to be a group of qualities which are feelings—its color, form, solidity, position, motion—all its physical attributes being what is felt by us in consequence of the laws of our organization; yet inasmuch as these feelings have the characteristic marks of objectivity, and are thereby referred to some objective existence, we draw a broad line of demarcation between them and other feelings having the characteristic marks of subjectivity, and referring to ourselves as subjects. Psychological analysis shows us that this line of demarcation is artificial, only representing a diversity of aspect; but as such it is indispensable to science. We cannot really separate in a sensation what is objective from what is subjective, and say how much belongs to the Cosmos apart from Sensibility, and how much to the subject pure and simple; we can only view the sensation alternately in its objective and subjective aspects. What belongs to extra-mental existence in the phenomenon of Color, and what to the “greeting of the spirit,” is utterly beyond human knowledge: for the ethereal undulations which physicists presuppose as the cosmic condition are themselves subjected to this same greeting of the spirit: they too are ideal forms of sensible experiences.
10. This conclusion, however, was very slowly reached. The distinction of aspects was made the ground of a corresponding distinction in agencies. Each group was personified and isolated. The one group was personified in Spirit—an existent in every respect opposed to Matter, which was the existent represented in the other group. One was said to be simple, indestructible; the other compound, destructible. One was invisible, impalpable, beyond the grasp of Sense; the other was visible, tangible, sensible. One was of heaven, the other of earth. Thus a biological Dualism, analogous to the cosmological, replaced the First Notion. It was undermined by advances in two directions. Psychology began to disclose that our conception of Matter was, to say the least, saturated with Mind, its Atoms confessedly being ideal figments; and that all the terms by which we expressed material qualities were terms which expressed modes of Feeling; so that whatever remained over and above this was the unknown x, which speculation required as a postulate. Idealism, rejecting this postulate, declared that Matter was simply the projection of Mind, and that our Body was the objectivation of our Soul. Physiology began to disclose that all the mental processes were (mathematically speaking) functions of physical processes, i. e. varying with the variations of bodily states; and this was declared enough to banish forever the conception of a Soul, except as a term simply expressing certain functions.
11. Idealism and Materialism are equally destructive of Dualism. The defects of particular idealist and materialist theories we will not here touch upon; they mainly result from defects of Method. Not sufficiently recognizing the primary fact testified by Consciousness, namely, that Experience expresses both physical and mental aspects, and that a Not-Self is everywhere indissolubly interwoven with Self, an objective factor with a subjective factor, the idealist reduces Existence to a mere panorama of mental states, and the Body to a group in this panorama. He is thus incapable of giving a satisfactory explanation of all the objective phenomena which do not follow in the same order as his feelings, which manifest a succession unlike his expectation, and which he cannot class under the order of his mental states hitherto experienced. He conceives that it is the Mind which prescribes the order in Things; whereas experience assures us that the order is described, not prescribed by us: described in terms of Feeling, but determined by the laws of Things, i. e. the genesis of subjective phenomena is determined by the action of the Cosmos on our Sensibility, and the reaction of our Sensibility. He overlooks the evidence that the mental forms or laws of thought which determine the character of particular experiences, were themselves evolved through a continual action and reaction of the Cosmos and the Soul, precisely as the laws of organic action which determine the character of particular functions were evolved through a continual adaptation of the organism to the medium. These immanent laws are declared to be transcendental, antecedent to all such action and reaction.
A similar exclusiveness vitiates the materialist doctrine. Overlooking the primary fact that Feeling is indissolubly interwoven with processes regarded as purely physical because they are considered solely in their objective aspect, the materialist fails to recognize the operation of psychological laws in the determination of physiological results; he hopes to reduce Biology to a problem of Mechanics. But Vitality and Sensibility are coefficients which must render the mechanical problem insoluble, if only on the ground that mechanical principles have reference to quantitative relations, whereas vital relations are qualitative. His error is the obverse of the vitalist’s error. The vitalist imagines that the speciality of organic phenomena proves the existence of a cause which has no community with the forces operating elsewhere; so, turning his back on all the evidence, he attempts to explain organic phenomena without any aid from Physics and Chemistry. The materialist, turning his back on all the evidence of quite special conditions only found at work in living organisms, tries to explain the problem solely by the aid of Physics and Chemistry. It is quite certain that physiological and psychological problems are not to be solved if we disregard the laws of Evolution through Epigenesis. The mental structure is evolved, as the physical structure is evolved. It is quite certain that no such evolution is visible in anorganisms, nor will any one suppose it to be possible in machines. From the biological point of view we must therefore reject both Idealism and Materialism. We applaud the one when it says, “Don’t confuse mental facts by the introduction of physical hypotheses”; and the other when it says, “Don’t darken physical facts with metaphysical mists.” We say to both, “By all means make clear to yourselves which aspect of the phenomena you are dealing with, and express each in its own terms. But in endeavoring to understand a phenomenon you must take into account all its ascertainable conditions. Now these conditions are sometimes only approachable from the objective side; at other times only from the subjective side.”
12. While it is necessary to keep the investigation of a process on its objective side, limited to objective conditions, and to express the result in objective terms, we must remember that this is an artifice; above all, we must remember that even within the objective limits our analyses are only provisional, and must be finally rectified by a restoration of all the elements we have provisionally set aside. Thus rectified, the objective interpretation of vital and mental phenomena has the incomparable advantage of simplifying research, keeping it fixed on physical processes, instead of being perturbed by suggestions of metaphysical processes. And as all physical investigation naturally tends to reduce itself to a mechanical investigation, because Mechanics is the science of motion, and all physical processes are motions, we may be asked, Why should not the mechanical point of view be the rational standing-point of the biologist? Our answer is, Because Mechanics concerns itself with abstract relations, and treats of products without reference to modes of production, i. e. with motions without reference to all the conditions on which they depend. Every physical change, if expressed in physical terms, is a change of position, and is determined by some preceding change of position. It is a movement having a certain velocity and direction, which velocity and direction are determined by the velocity and direction of a force (a pressure or a tension) compounded with the forces of resistance, i. e. counter-pressures. Clearly, the nature of the forces in operation must be taken into account; and it is this which the mechanical view disregards, the biological regards. The mechanical view is fixed on the ascertained adjustment of the parts, so that the working of the organism may be explained as if it were a machine, a movement here liberating a movement there. The biological view includes this adjustment of parts, but takes in also the conditions of molecular change in the parts on which the adjustment dynamically depends. Mechanical actions may be expressed as the enlargement or diminution of the angle of two levers; but chemical actions are not thus expressible; still less vital and mental actions.
13. The organism is on the physical side a mechanism, and so long as the mechanical interpretation of organic phenomena is confined to expressing the mechanical principles involved in the mechanical relations, it is eminently to be applauded. But the organism is something more than a mechanism, even on the physical side; or, since this statement may be misunderstood, let me say, what no one will dispute, that the organism is a mechanism of a very special kind, in many cardinal points unlike all machines. This difference of kind brings with it a difference of causal conditions. In so far as the actions of this mechanism are those of a dependent sequence of material positions, they are actions expressible in mechanical terms; but in so far as these actions are dependent on vital processes, they are not expressible in mechanical terms. Vital facts, especially facts of sensibility, have factors neither discernible in machines nor expressible in mechanical terms. We cannot ignore them, although for analytical purposes we may provisionally set them aside.
* * * * *
In the course of the development of the mechanical theory, the history of which has just been briefly sketched, biological problems have more and more come under its influence. There has always been a fierce resistance to the attempt to explain vital and sentient phenomena on mechanical, or even physical principles, but still the question has incessantly recurred, How far is the organism mechanically interpretable? And while the progress of Biology has shown more and more the machine-like adjustment of the several parts of which the organism is composed, it has also shown more and more the intervention of conditions not mechanically interpretable. We shall have to consider the question, therefore, under two forms. First, whether animals are machines, and if not, by what characters do we distinguish them from machines? Secondly, in what sense can we correctly speak of Feeling as an agent in organic processes?
CHAPTER II.
THE VITAL MECHANISM.
14. No answer can be successfully attempted in reply to the first of the questions which closed the last chapter until we have given precision to certain terms of incessant recurrence. I have often to remark on the peculiar misfortune of Psychology, that all its principal terms are employed by different writers, and are understood by different readers, in widely different senses: they denote and connote meanings of various significance. All physicists mean the same thing when they speak of weight, mass, momentum, electricity, heat, etc. All chemists mean the same thing when they speak of affinity, decomposition, oxygen, carbonic acid, etc. All physiologists mean the same thing when they speak of muscle, nerve, nutrition, secretion, etc. But scarcely any two psychologists mean precisely the same thing when they speak of sensation, feeling, thought, volition, consciousness, etc.; and the differences of denotation and connotation in their uses of such terms lead to endless misunderstanding. As Rousseau says: “Les définitions pourraient être bonnes si l’on n’employait pas les mots pour les faire.” But since we must employ words as our signs, our utmost care should be given to clearly marking what it is the signs signify.
15. The question we have now before us, whether animal actions are interpretable on purely mechanical principles? can only be answered after a preliminary settlement of the terms. The first of these terms to be settled is that of mechanism, when applied to the vital organism. If the organism is a mechanism, its actions must of course be interpretable on mechanical principles. But this general truth requires a special interpretation, if on inquiry we find that the organism is a particular kind of mechanism, one which is not to be classed under the same head as inorganic machines. And this we do find. In Problem I. § [22], will be found a statement of the radical difference between organic and inorganic mechanisms, due to the differences in their structures. But the differences there noted do not affect the operation of abstract mechanical principles, which are of course manifested wherever there is a dependent sequence of material changes; and which are the same abstract principles in the mechanism of the heavens, the mechanism of a paper-mill, or the mechanism of an animal body. In other words, the principles are abstract, and are abstracted from all concrete cases by letting drop what is special to each case, retaining only what is common to all. This procedure is indispensable to the ideal constructions of Science. But we cannot rightly interpret any concrete case by abstract principles alone; we must restore the special characters which the abstraction has eliminated. The most lucid explanation of the mechanism of the heavens will leave us quite in the dark respecting the action of a paper-mill, until we have studied the mill at work, ascertained its structure and mode of operation, and therein detected what is common both to its mechanism and to the mechanism of the heavens. Thus equipped, we approach the study of the animal mechanism, but find ourselves wholly in the dark until we have also ascertained its structure and mode of operation; then we may recognize in it the principles of dependent sequence which had been abstracted from the paper-mill and the heavens. To neglect this concrete study, and to argue from Machinery to Life in disregard of special conditions, is not more rational than to assume that the movement of a piston is prompted by volition.
16. The recognition of special differences is no denial of fundamental identities. We do not deny the presence of phenomena in organisms which belong to physical and chemical agencies, but we assert that organisms have other phenomena besides these, dependent on conditions not present in physical and chemical phenomena. The same material elements and forces may be recognized in a moving inorganic body, and a moving organic body; but in the latter there is a speciality of combination with a speciality of result. Just as the same words and laws of grammatical construction may be recognized in prose and poetry; yet poetry is not prose, but has special rules of its own, and special effects. In an organism, as in a machine, the adjustment of the parts is a condition of the mechanical action; the one enables us to explain the other. But the parts adjusted, and the consequences of the adjustment, are unlike in the two cases. This unlikeness is pervading and profound. One cardinal difference is that the combination of the parts is in the machine a fixed, in the organism a fluctuating adjustment; and this fluctuation is due to certain vital processes subjectively known as sensitive guidance. Hence machines have fixed and calculated mechanisms; whereas organisms are variable and to a great extent incalculable mechanisms.
17. I conceive, therefore, that a theory which reduces vital activities to purely physical processes is self-condemned. Not that we are to admit the agency of any extra-organic principle, such as the hypothesis of Vitalism assumes (Prob. I. § [14]); but only the agency of an intra-organic principle, or the abstract symbol of all the co-operant conditions—the special combination of forces which result in organization. This assures us that an organism is a peculiar kind of mechanism, the processes in which are peculiar to it; and among those processes there is one which results in what we call Sensibility. This Sensibility is a factor which raises the phenomena into another order. To overlook its presence is fatal to any explanation of the organic mechanism. Yet it is overlooked by those who tell us that when an impression on a nerve is conveyed to the brain, and is thence reflected on the limbs—as when the retina of a wolf is stimulated by the image of a sheep, and the spring of the wolf upon the sheep follows as a “purely mechanical consequence—the whole process has from first to last been physical.” Unless the term physical is here used to designate the objective sequence, as contemplated by an onlooker, who likens the process to the sequence observable in a machine, I should say that from first to last the process has been not physical, but vital, involving among its essential conditions the peculiarly vital factor named Sensibility. The process taking place in the wolf’s organism is one which involves conditions never found in purely physical processes. We may indeed analytically disregard these. We may view the process in its purely physical relations, or in its purely chemical relations, or in its purely mathematical (mechanical) relations. But this is the artifice of the analytical method. In reality the process is no one of these, for it is all of these; it is a process in a living organism, and depends on conditions only found in living organisms—nay, in this particular case the process depends on conditions only found in organisms like that of the wolf; for the image of the sheep will stimulate the brain of a goat, horse, or elephant without producing any such movement in the organism.
18. The importance of this point must excuse my reiteration of it. We must make clear to ourselves that the organism is in its objective aspect a physiological mechanism, in its subjective aspect a psychological mechanism: in both aspects it is to be radically demarcated from all inorganic mechanisms. In it the combination and co-ordination of movements involve conditions never present in machines; among these conditions, there are combinations and co-ordinations of Sensibility, which, although material processes on the objective side, are processes believed to be only present in organisms. We have the strongest reasons for concluding that every feeling, every change in Sensibility, has its correlative material process in the organism—is, in short, only the subjective aspect of the objective organic change. What in Physiology is called Co-ordination and has reference to movements, in Psychology may be called Logic, having reference to feelings. But be this latter point accepted or rejected, the one point which admits of no dispute is that an organism is radically distinguishable from every inorganic mechanism in that it acquires through the very exercise of its primary constitution, a new constitution with new powers. Its adjustment is a changing and developing mechanism. That is to say, a machine, however complex its structure, is constructed once for all, and this primary constitution is final, the adjustment of parts remaining unaltered; and although by exercise the machine may come to work more easily, with less friction, it never comes to work differently, to readjust its parts, and develop new capabilities. It has no historical factor manifest in its functions. It has no experience. It reacts at last as at first. How different the organism! This has not only variable adjustments due to internal fluctuations, it has experience which develops new parts, and new adjustments of old parts. Every organism has its primary constitution in the adjustment of parts peculiar to the species; it has also its secondary or modified constitution, in the adjustment which has been more or less altered by individual experiences; it has, thirdly, its temporary constitution in the variable adjustment due to the varying state of tension which results from varying stimulation.
19. A word on each. There is a structural disposition of the parts which is common to large groups of organisms, so that a corresponding similarity is observable in the reactions of these organisms. Thus all quadrupeds use their limbs for locomotion in very similar ways; birds use their wings for flight in similar ways. All vertebrates swallow their food, defend themselves, shrink when hurt, etc., in ways that are very similar. In so far as their organizations are alike, their actions and reactions are alike. In so far as their organizations differ, their actions and reactions differ. The goose and the vulture are alike in the main lines of structure; still more alike are duck and hen; yet, owing to certain unlike characters of structure, they manifest some marked differences in action and reaction: the goose will starve in the presence of food which the vulture gluttonously devours, and the vulture will refuse the vegetable food which the goose devours; the duck plunges into the water, the hen not only refuses to enter it, but is greatly agitated when she sees the ducklings she has hatched plunging into it. That peculiar instincts, habits, and feelings are rigorously determined by peculiarities in the organism, no one doubts, when animals are in question. If this is less obvious in the case of men, the reason is that there the influence of other factors somewhat masks the operation of the primary constitution—these factors are the modified and the temporary constitutions. Yet even in man it is true to say that his feelings and actions are the result of his organization, native and acquired.
20. No two men are organized in all respects alike. There are individual variations in structure, both native and acquired. These may be too slight to be appreciable by any other test than the difference of reaction under similar external stimuli; but the variations in the sensibility to music, color, temperature, sexual influence, moral influence, etc., betray corresponding differences in the organisms. Any one variation in structure, seemingly trivial, may be the origin of well-marked diversity in physical and moral characters. Compare the bull with the ox, or the predatory aggressive eagle with the cowardly vulture. Nor are the temporary modifications to be overlooked. Antoine Cros mentions the case of a patient, a young girl, suffering from congested liver and spleen, which of course altered the state of her blood, and thus for a time modified her constitution. Her moral character was greatly altered by it. She ceased to feel any affection for father or mother; would play with her doll, but could not be brought to show any delight in it; could not be drawn out of her apathetic sadness. Things which previously had made her shriek with laughter, now left her uninterested. Her temper changed, became capricious and violent.[207] Congestion of the lungs, if unaccompanied by congestion of the liver, never produces such effects, because not thus altering the blood. The effects of liver congestion are familiar. Cros cites the case of a magistrate whose liver was enlarged, and whose skin showed a markedly bilious aspect, and in whom all affection seemed to be dead: he did not exhibit any perversion or violence, only want of emotive reaction. If he went to the theatre he could not feel the slightest pleasure in it. The thoughts of his home, his absent wife and children, were, he declared, as unaffecting to him as a problem in Euclid.
21. Owing to the recognized dependence of peculiar instincts and modes of reaction on peculiarities of structure, comparative anatomists are quite confident, when they find a portion of a skull with two occipital condyles, that the animal to which this skull belonged had red blood-corpuscles without nuclei, and (if a female) suckled its young. If in that fragment of skull there remain a single tooth, it will prove that the animal was carnivorous or herbivorous, and had, or had not, retractile claws. From such data a general conclusion may be formed as to the instincts and habits of the animal. The data disclose much of the primary constitution, that is to say, the mechanism which the animal brought with it into the world, ready prepared to react in definite ways on being stimulated. The connate mechanism has correlative tendencies of reaction. Some of these tendencies are inevitably called into play by external conditions, and they continue unaltered amid great varieties of circumstances, provided none of these variations directly deprive them of their appropriate stimulation. Such tendencies of the connate mechanism are styled automatic (an unfortunate metaphor, which has led to the theory of Automatism), and include, besides the visceral reactions, the more complex reactions of winking, breathing, swallowing, coughing, flying, walking, etc. It is true that we learn to walk, and learn to wink, whereas the other actions require no tentative efforts directed by experience; but the mechanism of all these actions is already laid down in the primary constitution, and is inevitably called into play.
22. The instincts also belong to the connate mechanism, and in the course of the normal experience of the animal inevitably come into play; but, unlike the automatic tendencies of breathing, swallowing, and coughing, they are capable of modification, or even suppression, by alterations in the course of individual experience. The connate mechanism of the cat determines its dread of water, and its enmity to the dog and mouse; yet a cat will by the modifications of certain experiences become as ready as an otter to take to the water, and become so fond of a dog that she will allow him to tend upon her kittens; and so indifferent to the mouse that she will let it run over her body. All this implies a new adjustment in the nervous centres, with new modes of reaction on sensory impressions: the inherited mechanism has been modified. I need not dwell on the profound modifications which the human inherited mechanism undergoes in the course of experience—how social influences and moral and religious teachings redirect, or even suppress, many primary tendencies; so that “moral habits” become organized, and replace the original tendencies of the organism. These, when organized, become the inevitable modes of reaction, and are sometimes called secondarily automatic. It is important to recognize this organization of experiences, this acquisition of a secondary or modified constitution, if we would explain psychological processes by physiological processes. Thus the processes of Logic are automatic, they belong to the connate primary mechanism, and their action is inevitable, invariable. The elements of a judgment, like the elements of a perception, may vary, and we therefore say that one judgment is false, and one perception incomplete; but the judging process is always the same, and the perceiving process is always the same. We may breathe pure air or impure air, but the breathing process is in each case the same; and judgment is as automatic as breathing, not to be altered, not to be suppressed. Again, the moral terror at wickedness of any recognized kind is as automatic as the instinctive terror at danger. The one has its roots in the primary disposition called love of approbation and its correlative dread of disapprobation: the social instinct. The other has its root in the primary disposition called “instinct of self-preservation,” which is really the reflex shrinking from pain: the physiological instinct.
23. Besides the connate and acquired mechanism, we have now to consider the temporary and fluctuating adjustments which represent the statical condition of the organism at each moment. The automatism of the primary constitution is such that previous experience and conscious effort are not needed; nor will any experience or any effort alter the mode of reaction. If a strong light falls on the eye, the iris contracts; if the eyeball is dry, the eyelid drops; if sound-waves beat upon the tympanum, the stapedius muscle contracts; if the lining of the throat be tickled, the muscles involved in coughing or in vomiting contract. No experience is necessary for these actions, some of which are so complicated that if we had to learn them, as we learn far simpler actions, the organism would perish before the power was attained. Yet all of these presuppose a certain normal state of the mechanism, any considerable variation in which will modify or suppress them.
24. Secondarily automatic actions are those which have been acquired through experiences that have modified the organism, and produced a new adjustment of parts. We learn to shield the eyes against a strong glare of light by raising the hand; by winking we learn to shield the eye against an approaching body; we also learn to turn the head in the direction of a sound, and to thrust away with our hands the object that is irritating our skin. Experience has been necessary for all these actions, and has finally organized the tendencies to perform them, so that the reaction is invariable, inevitable, unless controlled by the will. If you tickle my throat, I may, or may not, push aside your hand; but if the inside of my throat be tickled, I must cough. Here we see the difference between the automatic and secondarily automatic actions. The second being due to individual experience, are more or less controllable; and whether they are or are not controlled depends on the condition of the nerve-centres at the moment. You may tickle my throat, or irritate my skin, without causing any movement of my hands to thwart you, either because my nerve-centres are preoccupied by other stimulations, and I am not conscious of the irritation, or because I do not choose to thwart you.
25. It should be added that some secondarily automatic actions have become so firmly organized that we can only with great difficulty interfere with them. Others never enter into consciousness, and are therefore often supposed to be purely mechanical. The movement of the eye towards the brightest light, and the convergence of the axes of both eyes, are reflexes which, although involuntary and unconscious, are the products of education. They do not belong to the connate constitution, although they are so inevitably acquired by experience that they belong to every normal child. At first the infant stares with a blank gaze, and its eyes, though moving under the stimulus of light, move incoherently; the axes never converge except by accident. Very early, however, the infant’s eyes are observed to follow the movements of a bright light; and at last they acquire so certain and rapid a power of adjustment that the eyes shift from spot to spot, always “fixing” the object by bringing the most sensitive part of the retina to bear on it. The incoherent movements have become precisely regulated movements. It is the same with speech. The vocal organs are exercised in an incoherent babble. By degrees these movements become regulated so as to respond definitely to definite stimuli, and words are formed, then sentences, till finally fluent speech becomes in a great degree automatic. The vocal muscles respond to an auditory stimulus, and the child repeats the word it has heard, just as the eye-muscles respond to a retinal stimulus. That we acquire the power of converging the axes, and accommodating the lens to near objects, is not only proved by observation of infants, but also by cases of disease. After the reflex mechanism has been long established, so that it acts with inevitable precision, a slight paralysis of one of the muscles has the effect of making all objects appear in a different position; the patient trying to touch an object, then always moves his hand on one side of it. Von Graefe relates the case of a stonebreaker who always struck his hand with the hammer when he tried to strike the stone. Yet this very man learned to accommodate his movements to the new impressions; so that if his paralysis had been cured, his modified mechanism would have been ill adapted to the new conditions, and he would once more have struck his hand instead of the stone.
26. This digression on the native and acquired dispositions of the organism, while it has brought into strong light all that can be cited in favor of regarding animal bodies as mechanisms, and their actions as the direct consequences of mechanical adjustments, has also made conspicuous the radical difference between an organism and a machine. We cannot too emphatically insist on this radical difference. Between the group of conditions involved in the structure and action of a machine, and the group of conditions involved in the structure and action of an organism, there are contrasts as broad as any that can be named. To overlook these in taking account solely of the conditions common to both groups is a serious error. On such grounds we might insist that a tiger is a violet, because both are organisms.
The biologist will admit that an organism is a mechanism, and (in so far as its bodily structure is concerned) a material mechanism. All the actions of this structure are therefore mechanical, in the two senses of the term: first, as being the actions of material adjustments; secondly, as being movements, and thereby included under the general laws of motion represented in Mechanics; the abstract laws of movement for an organic body are not different from the abstract laws of movement for an inorganic body. So far we have been considering the abstract relations only. No sooner do we consider the phenomena as concrete wholes, than we find great diversity in the modes of production of the movements in organisms and machines. Now it is precisely the modes of production which have interest for us. We never understand a phenomenon so as to gain any practical control over it, or any theoretical illumination from it, unless we have mastered some of its conditions; our knowledge of these conditions is the measure of our power.
CHAPTER III.
THE RELATION OF BODY AND MIND.
27. The second question proposed was, In what sense can Feeling be correctly spoken of as an Agent in organic processes? This brings us face to face with a much-debated topic, the relation of Body and Mind; and demands a theoretic interpretation of that First Notion which expresses universal experience, namely, that what I know as Myself is a Body, in one aspect, and a Soul, in the other. What I call my Body is a persistent aggregate of objective phenomena; and my Soul is a persistent aggregate of subjective phenomena: the one is an individualized group of experiences expressible in terms of Matter and Motion, and therefore designated physical; the other an individualized group of experiences expressible in terms of Feeling, and therefore designated psychical. But, however contrasted, they are both simply embodiments of Experience, that is to say, are Modes of Feeling. All Existence—as known to us—is the Felt. The laws of our organism compel us, indeed, to postulate an Existent which is extra mentem—a Real not Ourselves—but the same laws debar us from any knowledge whatever of what this is, or is like. We know Things absolutely in so far as they exist in relation to us; and that is the only knowledge which can have any possible significance for us.
28. It is impossible for me to doubt that I am a Body, though I may doubt whether what is thus called is anything more than a group of feelings. It is impossible for me to doubt that I am a Soul; though I may doubt whether what is thus called is more than a group of bodily functions. In separating what is unquestionable from what is questionable, we separate the fundamental facts of consciousness from the theoretic interpretations of those facts: no theoretic interpretation can efface or alter the facts. Whatever Philosophy may discover, it cannot displace the fact that I know I am a Soul, in every sense in which that phrase represents Experience: I know the Soul in knowing its concretes (feelings), and in knowing it as an abstraction which condenses those concretes in a symbol. The secondary question is, Whether this abstraction represents one Existent, and the abstraction Body another and wholly different Existent, or the two abstractions represent only two different Aspects? this may be debated, and must be answered according to theoretic probabilities.
29. What are the probabilities? We are all agreed that Consciousness is the final arbiter. Its primary deliverance is simply that of a radical distinction. It is silent on the nature of the distinction—says nothing as to whether the distinction is one of agents or of aspects. It says, “I am a Soul.” With equal clearness it says, “I am a Body.” It does not say, “I am two things.” Nor does the fact of a radical distinction imply more than a contrast of aspects, such as that of convex and concave. The curve has at every point this contrast of convex and concave, and yet is the identical line throughout. A mental process is at every point contrasted with the physical process assumed to be its correlate; and this contrast demands equivalent expression in the terms of each. The identity underlying the two aspects of the curve is evident to Sense. The identity underlying the mental and physical process is not evident to Sense, but may be made eminently probable to Speculation, especially when we have explained the grounds of the difference, namely, that they are apprehended through different modes. But although I admit that the conclusion is only one of probability, it is one which greatly transcends the probability of any counter-hypothesis. Let us see how this can be made out.[208]
30. We start from the position that a broad line of demarcation must be drawn between the mental and the physical aspect of a process, supposing them to be identical in reality. Nothing can be more unlike a logical proposition than the physical process which is its correlate; so that Philosophy has hitherto been forced to forego every attempt at an explanation of how the two can be causally connected: referring the connection to a mystery, or invoking two different agents, spiritual and material, moving on parallel lines, like two clocks regulated to work simultaneously. But having recognized this difference, can we not also discern fundamental resemblances? First and foremost, we note that there is common to both the basis in Feeling: they are both modes of Consciousness. The Mind thinking the logical proposition is not, indeed, in the same state as the Mind picturing the physical process which is the correlate of that logical proposition—no more than I, who see you move on being struck, have the same feelings as you who are struck. But the Mind which pictures the logical proposition as a process, and pictures the physical process as a bodily change, is contemplating one and the same event under its subjective and objective aspects; just as when I picture to myself the feelings you experience on being struck I separate the subjective aspect of the blow from its objective aspect. Secondly, between the logical proposition and the physical process there is a community of causal dependence, i. e. the mode of grouping of the constituent elements, whereby this proposition, and not another, is the result of this grouping, and not another. In fact, what in subjective terms is called Logic, in objective terms is Grouping.
31. Let us approach the question on a more accessible side. Sensation avowedly lies at the basis of mental manifestations. Now, rightly or wrongly, Sensation is viewed alternately as a purely subjective fact—a psychological process—and as a purely objective fact—the physiological reaction of a sense-organ. It is so conspicuously a physiological process that many writers exclude it from the domain of Mind, assign it to the material organism, and believe that it is explicable on purely mechanical principles. This seems to me eminently disputable; but the point is noticed in proof of the well-marked objective character which the phenomenon assumes. In this aspect a sensation is simply the reaction of a bodily organ. The physiologist describes how a stimulus excites the organ, and declares its reaction to be the sensation. Thus viewed, and expressed in terms of Matter and Motion, there is absolutely nothing of that subjective quality which characterizes sensation. Yet without this quality the objective process cannot be a sensation. Exclude Feeling, and the excitation of the auditory organ will no more yield the sensation of Sound by its reaction, than the strings and sounding-board of a piano when the keys are struck will yield music to a deaf spectator. Hence the natural inference has been that inside the organism there is a listener: the Soul is said to listen, transforming excitation into sensation. This inference only needs a more systematic interpretation and it will represent the biological theory, which demands something more than the reaction of the sensory organ—namely, the reaction of the whole organism through the sensory organ. I mean, that no organ isolated from the organism is capable of a physiological reaction—only of a physico-chemical reaction; and sensation depends on (is) the physiological reaction. When a sense-organ is stimulated, this stimulation is a vital process, and is raised out of the class of physico-chemical processes by virtue of its being the indissoluble part of a complex whole. Interfere with any one of the co-operant conditions—withdraw the circulation, check respiration, disturb secretion—and the sense-organ sinks from the physiological to the physical state; it may then be brought into contact with its normal stimuli, but no stimulation (in the vital sense) will take place, there will be no vital reaction.
Condensing all vital processes in the symbol Vitality, we may say Vitality is requisite for every physiological process. A parallelism may be noted on the subjective side: all the sentient processes may be condensed in the one symbol Sensibility (Feeling), and we must then say, No psychological process is possible as an isolated fact, but demands the co-operation of others—it is a resultant of all the contemporaneous conditions of Sensibility in the organism. In ordinary language this is what is meant by saying that no impression can become a sensation without the intervention of Consciousness—an ambiguous phrase, because of the ambiguity of the term Consciousness, but the phrase expresses the fact that in Sensation a process in the organism is necessary to the reaction of the organ.
32. Having recognized the distinction between the two processes objective and subjective, physical and mental, we have recognized the vanity of attempting to assign their limits, and to say where Motion ends and Feeling begins, or how Feeling again changes into Motion. The one does not begin where the other ends. According to the two-clock theory of Dualism, the two agents move on parallel lines. On the theory of Monism the two aspects are throughout opposed. Both theories explain the facts; which explanation is the most congruous with experience? Against the first we may object that the hypothesis of two Agents utterly unallied in nature wants the cardinal character of a fertile hypothesis in its unverifiableness: it may be true, we can never know that it is true. By the very terms of its definition, the Spirit—if that mean more than an abstract expression of sentient states—is beyond all sensible experience. This is indeed admitted by the dualists, for they postulate a Spirit merely because they cannot otherwise explain the phenomena of Consciousness. Herein they fail to see that even their postulate brings no explanation, it merely restates the old problem in other terms.
33. Up to the present time these same objections might have been urged with equal force against Monism. Indeed, although many philosophers have rejected the two-clock theory of Leibnitz, they have gained a very hesitating acceptance for their own hypothesis of identity. To most minds the difficulty of imagining how a physical process could also be a psychical process, a movement also be a feeling, seemed not less than that of imagining how two such distinct Agents as Matter and Mind could co-operate, and react on each other, or move simultaneously on parallel lines. Although for many years I have accepted the hypothesis of Monism, I have always recognized its want of an adequate reply to such objections. Unless I greatly deceive myself, I have now found a solution of the main difficulty; and found it in psychological conditions which are perfectly intelligible. But knowing how easily one may deceive one’s self in such matters, I will only ask the reader to meditate with open-mindedness the considerations now to be laid before him, and see if he can feel the same confidence in their validity.
34. One of the early stages in the development of Experience is the separation of Self from the Not-Self. I look out on “the vast extern of things,” and see a great variety of objects, included in a visible hemisphere. All these objects in various positions, having various forms and colors, I believe to be wholly detached from, and in every way unallied to, Myself. And what is that Self? It is my Body as a visible and tangible object, separated from all other visible and tangible objects by the constant presence of feelings connected with it and its movements, and not connected with the other objects. This constant presence of feelings is referred to a Soul, which I then separate from my Body, as an Inner Self; and from this time onwards I speak of the Body as mine, and learn to regard it in much the same light as other outer objects. In my naïve judgment the external objects are supposed to exist as I see and touch them, whether I or any one else see and touch them or not: they in no sense belong to the series of feelings which constitute the Me. And since my Body resembles these objects in visible and tangible qualities, and also in being external to my feelings, it also takes its place in the objective world. Thus arises the hypothesis of Dualism which postulates a Physis, or object-world, and an Æsthesis, or subject-world: two independent existents, one contemplated, the other contemplating.
35. Philosophy, as we know, leads to a complete reversal of this primitive conclusion, and shows that the contemplated is a synthesis of contemplations, the Physis being also the Æsthesis. Psychological investigation shows that the objects supposed to have forms, colors, and positions within an external hemisphere, have these only in virtue of the very feelings from which they are supposed to be separated. The visible universe exists only as seen: the objects are Reals conditioned by the laws of Sensibility. The space in which we see them, their geometrical relations, the light and shadows which reveal them, the forms they affect, the lines of their changing directions, the qualities which distinguish them,—all these are but the externally projected signs of feelings. They are signs which we interpret according to organized laws of experience; each sign being itself a feeling connected with other feelings. We project them outside according to the “law of eccentric projection”—which is only the expression of the fact that one feeling is a sign of some other, and is thereby ideally detached from it. According to this law I say, “my Body”; just as I say, “my House”; or, “my Property.” Misled by this, Dualism holds that in the very fact of detaching my Body from my Self, calling it mine, is the revelation of a distinct entity within the body. But that this is illusory, appears in the application of this same law of eccentric projection to sensations and thoughts, which are called mine, as my legs and arms are mine. If it is undeniable that I say my Body—and thus ideally detach the Body from the Soul—it is equally undeniable that I say my Soul; and from what is the Soul detached? In presence of this difficulty, the metaphysician may argue that neither Body nor Soul can be coextensive with its manifestations, but demands a noumenal Real for each—a substratum for the bodily manifestations, and a substratum for the mental manifestations. This, however, is an evasion, not a solution of the difficulty. If we postulate an unknown and unknowable noumenon, we gain no insight: first, because Philosophy deals only with the known functions of unknown quantities, and therefore leaves the x out of the calculation; secondly, because, granting the existence of these noumena, we can have no rational grounds for asserting that they are not of one and the same nature; for we have no grounds for any assertion whatever about them. And if it be urged against this, that Consciousness testifies to a distinction, I answer that on a closer scrutiny it will be found to testify to nothing more than a diversity of manifestation. All therefore that comes within the range of knowledge is, How does this diversity arise?
36. There are two ways, and there are only two, in which differences arise. These are, 1°, the modes of production of a product, and, 2°, our modes of apprehension of the product. Things may be very different, and yet to our apprehension indistinguishable, so that we regard them as identical; and they may be identical, yet appear utterly unlike. A mechanical bird may seem so like a living bird, and their actions so indistinguishable to the spectator, that he will not suspect a difference, or suspecting it, will not be able to specify it. Of both objects, so long as his modes of apprehending them are circumscribed, he can only say what these imply: he sees familiar forms, colors, and movements, which he interprets according to the previous experiences of which these are the signs. But by varying the modes of apprehension, and gaining thus a fuller knowledge, he finds that the two products have very different modes of production; hence he concludes the products to be different: the mechanism of the one is not the organism of the other; the actions of the mechanical bird are not the actions of the living bird. The fuller knowledge has been gained by viewing the objects under different relations, and contemplating them in their modes of production, not as merely visible products. He sees the mechanism performing by steel springs, wheels, and wires, the work which the organism performs by bones, muscles, and nerves; and the farther his analysis of the modes of production is carried, the greater are the differences which he apprehends.
37. Now consider the other side. One and the same object will necessarily present very different aspects under different subjective conditions, since it is these which determine the aspect. The object cannot be to Sight what it is to Hearing, to Touch what it is to Smell. The vibrations of a tuning-fork are seen as movements, heard as sounds. In current language the vibrations are said to cause the sounds. Misled by this, philosophers puzzle themselves as to how a material process (vibration) can be transformed into a mental process (sensation), how such a cause can have so utterly different an effect. But I have formerly[209] argued at some length that there is no transformation or causation of the kind supposed. The tuning-fork—or that Real which in relation to Sense is the particular object thus named—will, by one of its modes of acting on my Sensibility through my optical apparatus, determine the response known as vibrations; but it is not this response of the optical organ which is transformed into, or causes the response of the auditory organ, known as sound. The auditory organ knows nothing of vibrations, the optical nothing of sounds. The responses are both modes of Feeling determined by organic conditions, and represent the two different relations in which the Real is apprehended. The Real is alternately the one and the other. And if the one mode of Feeling has a physical significance, while the other has a mental significance, so that we regard the vibrations as objective facts, belonging to the external world, and the sounds as subjective facts, exclusively belonging to the internal world, this is due to certain psychological influences presently to be expounded. Meanwhile let us fix clearly in our minds that both vibrations and sounds are modes of Feeling. My consciousness plainly assures me that it is I who see the one, and hear the other; not that there are two distinct subjects for the two distinct feelings. Add to which, manifold uncontradicted experiences assure me that the occasional cause—the objective factor—of the one feeling, is also the cause of the other, and not that the two feelings have two different occasional causes. From both of these undeniable facts we must conclude that the difference felt is simply a difference of aspect, determined by some difference in the modes of apprehension.
38. Assuming then that a mental process is only another aspect of a physical process—and this we shall find the more probable hypothesis—we have to explain by what influences these diametrically opposite aspects are determined. From all that has just been said we must seek these in the modes of apprehension. There can be no doubt that we express the fact in very different terms; the question is, What do these terms signify? Why do we express one aspect in terms of Matter and Motion, assigning the process to the objective world; and the other aspect in terms of Feeling, assigning the process to the subjective world?
Let the example chosen be a logical process as the mental aspect, and a neural process as its physical correlate. The particular proposition may be viewed logically, as a grouping of experiences, or physiologically, as a grouping of neural tremors. Here we have the twofold aspect of one and the same reality; and these different aspects are expressed in different terms. We cannot be too rigorous in our separation of the terms; for every attentive student must have noted how frequently discussions are made turbid by the unconscious shifting of terms in the course of the argumentation. This is not only the mistake of opponents who are unaware of the shifting which has occurred in each other’s minds, so that practically the adversaries do not meet on common ground, but cross and recross each other; it is also the mistake of the solitary thinker losing himself in the maze of interlacing conceptions instead of keeping steadily to one path. Only by such shifting of terms can the notion of the physical process causing, or being transformed into, the mental process for a moment gain credit; and this also greatly sustains the hypothesis of Dualism, with its formidable objections: How can Matter think? How can Mind act on Matter causing Motion?
39. Those who recognized that the terms Matter and Mind were abstractions mutually exclusive, saw at once that these questions, instead of being formidable, were in truth irrational. To ask if Matter could think, or Mind move Matter, was a confusion of symbols equivalent to speaking of a yard of Hope, and a ton of Terror. Although Measure and Weight are symbols of Feeling, and in this respect are on a par with Hope and Terror, yet because they are objective symbols they cannot be applied to subjective states, without violation of the very significance they were invented to express. No one ever asks whether a sensation of Sound can be a sensation of Color; nor whether Color can move a machine, although Heat can, yet the one is no less a sensation than the other. On similar grounds no one should ask whether Matter can think, or Mind move Matter. The only rational question is one preserving the integrity of the terms, namely, whether the living, thinking organism presents itself to apprehension under the twofold aspect—now under the modes of Feeling classified as objective or physical; now under the modes classified as subjective or mental.
40. We are told that it is “impossible to imagine Matter thinking,” which is very true; only by a gross confusion of terms can Thought be called a property of cerebral tissue, or of Matter at all. We may, indeed, penetrate beneath the terms which relate to aspects, and recognize in the underlying reality not two existences, but one. Our conceptions of this reality, however, are expressed in symbols representing different classes of feelings, objective and subjective; and to employ the terms of one class to designate the conceptions of the other is to frustrate the very purposes of language. Matter and Mind, Object and Subject, are abstractions from sentient experiences. We know them as abstractions, and know the concrete experiences from which they are abstracted. Philosophers, indeed, repeatedly assure us that we neither know what Matter is nor what Mind is, we only know the phenomenal products of the action and reaction of these two unknown noumena. Were this so, all discussion would be idle; we could not say whether Matter was or was not capable of thinking, whether Mind was or was not the same as Matter, we could only abstain from saying anything whatever on the topic. What should we reply to one who asked us to name the product of two unknown quantities? So long as x and y are without values their product must be without value. If the value of x be known, and that of y unknown, then the product still remains unknown: x + y = x + 0 = x. Therefore, unless the Objective aspect were the equivalent of the Subjective aspect, it could never be subjectively present. Feeling is but another aspect of the Felt.
41. It is because we do know what Matter is, that we know it is not Mind: they are symbols of two different modes of Feeling. If we separate the conception of citizenship from the conception of fatherhood, although the same man is both citizen and father, how much more decisively must we separate the conception of Matter, which represents one group of feelings, from the conception of Mind, which represents another? One element in the former is common to the whole group, namely, the reference to a Not-Self, induced by the sensation of Resistance, which always ideally or sensibly accompanies the material class. The axiom, I feel, ergo I exist, has its correlative:—I act, ergo there are other existents on which I act; and these are not wholly Me, for they resist, oppose, exclude me; yet they are also one with Me, since they are felt by me. In my Feeling, that which is not Me is Matter, the objective aspect of the Felt, as Mind is the subjective aspect.
But since Hunger and Thirst, Joy and Grief, Pain and Terror, are also felt, yet are never classed under the head of Matter, the grounds of the classification of feelings have to be expressed. Professor Bain makes the distinction between Matter and Mind to rest solely on the presence or absence of Extension: this is the decisive mark: Matter he defines as the Extended. The definition is inadequate. When I see a dog and its image reflected in a pool, or see a dog and think of another, in the three cases dog, image, and idea have Extension; but I recognize the dog as a material fact, the idea as a mental fact; and although the image of the dog has material conditions by which I am optically affected, just as the idea has material cerebral conditions, I recognize a marked difference between them and the dog, due to the different modes of apprehension. The dog is known as a persistent reality, which, when Sight is supplemented by Touch, will yield sensations of Resistance, and thus disclose its materiality. The image vanishes if I attempt to touch it; I see its outlines waver and become confused with every disturbance of the surface of the pool; the idea vanishes when another idea arises; whence I conclude that neither has material reality, because neither has the Resistance which characterizes the Not-Self. The image and the idea may be referred to material conditions, but so may pains, terrors, volitions, yet these are all without Extension, simply because they are not visual feelings.
42. Matter does not represent all feelings, but only the objective sensibles; and these are not all characterized by Extension, but only those which directly or indirectly involve optico-tactical experiences accompanied by muscular experiences. Matter is primarily the Visible and Resistant; and secondarily, whatever can be imagined as such; so that ether, molecules, and atoms, although neither visible nor tangible, are ranged under the head of Matter. Color is a feeling as Sound and Scent are feelings, and although material conditions are equally presupposed in all three, yet Color alone has Extension, and because it can be imaged it has a more objective character than the others, which having no lines and surfaces, want the optical conditions for the formation of images, and are less definitely connected with tactical and muscular experiences. Nevertheless, since Sound and Scent are obviously associated with objects seen and touched, they have a degree of materiality never assigned to such feelings as Hunger and Thirst, Pleasure, Terror, and Hope.
43. When we refer feelings to material conditions, we follow the natural tendency to translate the little known in terms of the better known, and employ the symbols Matter and Motion, because these furnish the intellect with images, i. e. definite and exact elements to operate with. In hearing a sound, there is nothing at all like “vibrations,” nothing like “aerial waves” and “neural processes,” given in that feeling; but on attempting to explain it, we remove it from the sphere of Sensation to carry it into the sphere of Intellect, and we must change our symbols in changing our problem; here our only resource is to translate the subjective state into an imaginable objective process, which can only be expressed in terms of Matter and Motion. What we heard as Sound is then seen as Vibration. When we are optically or mentally contemplating vibrations and neural processes, we are supplanting one source of feeling by another, translating an event in another set of symbols. But we can no more hear the sound in seeing the vibrations, than a blind man can see the fly in the amber which he feels with his fingers, or than we can feel the amber he holds, while we are only looking at it. The phrase “material conditions of Feeling” sometimes designates the objective aspect of the subjective process, and sometimes the agencies in the external medium which co-operate with the organism in the production of the feelings. In each case there is an attempt to explain a feeling by intelligible symbols.
44. The Animal probably never attempts such explanation; satisfied with the facts, it is careless of their factors. Man is never satisfied: is restless in the search after factors; and having found them, seeks factors of these factors; so that Lichtenberg felicitously calls him “das rastlose Ursachenthier”—“the animal untiring in the search for causes.” And thus sciences arise: we translate experiences into geometrical, physical, chemical, physiological, and psychological terms—different symbols of the different modes of apprehending phenomena.
45. “I see an elephant.” In other words, I am affected in a certain way, and interpret my affection by previous similar experiences, expressing these in verbal symbols. But I want an explanation, and this the philosopher vouchsafes to me by translating my affection into his terms. He takes me into another sphere—tells me of an undulating Ether, the waves of which beat upon my retina—of lines of Light refracted by media and converged by lenses according to geometric laws—of the formation thereby of a tiny image of the gigantic elephant on my retina as on the plate of a camera-obscura—this, and much more, is what he sees in my visual feeling, and he bids me see it also. Grateful for the novel instruction, I am compelled to say that it does not alter my vision of the elephant, does not make the fact a whit clearer, does not indeed correspond with what I feel. It is outside knowledge, valuable, as all knowledge is, but supplementary. It is translation into another language. And when I come to examine the translation, I find it very imperfect. I ask my instructor: Is it the tiny image on my retina which I see, and not the big elephant on the grass? And how do I see this retinal image, which you explain to be upside down?—how is it carried from my retina to my mind? I have no consciousness of tiny reversed image, none of my retina, only of a fact of feeling, which I call “seeing an elephant.” The camera-obscura has no such feeling—it reflects the image, it does not see the object. Here my instructor, having reached the limit of his science,[210] hands me over to the physiologist, who will translate the fact for me in terms not of Geometry, but of Anatomy and Physiology. The laws of Dioptrics cease at this point: the image they help to form on the retina is ruthlessly dispersed, and all its beautiful geometric construction is lost in a neural excitation, which is transmitted through semifluid channels of an optic tract to a semifluid ganglion, whence a thrill is shot through the whole brain, and is there transformed into a visual sensation. Again I fancy I have gained novel instruction of a valuable kind; but it does not affect my original experience that I am enabled to translate it into different terms; the less so because I cannot help the conviction that the translation is imperfect, leaving out the essential points. If a phrase be translated for me into French or German, I gain thereby an addition to my linguistic knowledge, but the experience thus variously expressed remains unaffected. When the fact is expressed in geometrical or physiological terms, the psychical process finds no adequate expression. Neither in the details, nor in the totals, do I recognize any of the qualities of my state of feeling in seeing the elephant. I do not see the geometrical process, I do not see the anatomical mechanism, I see the elephant, and am conscious only of that feeling. You may consider my organism geometrically or anatomically, and bring it thus within the circle of objective knowledge; but my subjective experience, my spiritual existence, that of which I am most deeply assured, demands another expression. Nay more, on closely scrutinizing your objective explanations, it is evident that a psychical process is implied throughout—such terms as undulations, refractions, media, lenses, retina, neural excitation, overtly refer, indeed, to the material objective aspect of the facts, but they are themselves the modes of Feeling by which the facts are apprehended, and would not exist as such without the “greeting of the spirit.”
46. What, then, is our conclusion? It is, that to make an adequate explanation of psychical processes by material conditions we must first establish an equivalence between the subjective and objective aspects; and, having taken this step, we must complete it by showing wherein the difference exists; having established this entity and diversity, we have solved the problem.
Let us attempt this solution. When I speak to you, the spoken words are the same to you and to me. You hear what I hear, you apprehend what I apprehend. But there were muscular movements of articulation felt by me and not felt by you; to feel these you also must articulate the words; but so long as you merely hear the words, there is a difference in our states of feeling. Some of my movements you can see, others you can imagine; but this is not my feeling of them, it is your optical equivalent of my muscular feeling. On a similar assumption of equivalence, a neural process is made to stand for a logical process. In thinking a proposition, we are logically grouping verbal symbols representative of sensible experiences; and this is a quite peculiar state of Consciousness, wholly unlike what would arise in the mental or visual contemplation of the neural grouping, which is its physiological equivalent. But this diversity does not discredit the idea of their identity; and although some of my readers will protest against such an idea, and will affirm that the logical process is not a process taking place in the organism at all, but in a spirit which uses the organism as its instrument, I must be allowed in this exposition to consider the identity established, my purpose being to explain the diversity necessarily accompanying it. Therefore, I say, that although a logical process is identical with a neural process, it must appear differently when the modes of apprehending it are different. While you are thinking a logical proposition, grouping your verbal symbols, I, who mentally see the process, am grouping a totally different set of symbols: to you the proposition is a subjective state, i. e. a state of feeling, not an object of feeling: to become an object, it must be apprehended by objective modes: and this it can become to you as to me, when we see it as a process, or imagine it as a process. But obviously your state in seeing or imagining the process must be different from your state when the process itself is passing, since the modes of apprehension are so different. There may be every ground for concluding that a logical process has its correlative physical process, and that the two processes are merely two aspects of one event; but because we cannot apprehend the one aspect as we apprehend the other, cannot see the logical sequence as we see the physical sequence, this difference in our modes of apprehension compels us to separate the two, assigning one to the subjective, the other to the objective class. Between the sensible perception of an object and the reproduced image of the object there is chiefly a quantitative difference in the physiological and psychological processes: the image is a faint sensation. Yet this quantitative difference brings with it the qualitative distinction which is indicated in our calling the one a sensation, the other a thought. The consequence has been that while all philosophers have admitted the sensation to be—at least partly—a process in the bodily organism, the majority have maintained that the thought is no such process in the organism, but has its seat in a spirit independent of the organism.
47. The states of Feeling which are associated with other states characterized as objective because overtly referring to a Not-Self, we group under the head of Matter: we assign material conditions as their antecedents. Whereas states of Feeling which are not thus associated we group under the head of Mind, and assign internal conditions as their antecedents. Color and Taste are very different states of Feeling, yet both are spontaneously referred to external causes, because they are associated with visual and tactical states; whereas Hunger, Nausea, Hope, etc., have no such associations, and their material conditions are only theoretically assigned.
Our intelligible universe is constructed out of the elements of Feeling according to certain classifications, the broadest of which is that into external and internal, object and subject. The abstractions Matter and Mind once formed and fixed in representative symbols, are easily accredited as two different Reels. But the separation is ideal, and is really a distinction of Aspects. We know ourselves as Body-Mind; we do not know ourselves as Body and Mind, if by that be meant two coexistent independent Existents; and the illusion by which the two Aspects appear as two Reals may be made intelligible by the analysis of any ordinary proposition. For example, when we say “this fruit is sweet,” we express facts of Feeling—actual or anticipated—in abstract terms. The concrete facts are these: a colored feeling, a solid feeling, a sweet feeling, etc., have been associated together, and the colored, solid, sweet group is symbolized in the abstract term “fruit” But the color, solidity, and sweetness are also abstract terms, representing feelings associated in other groups, so that we find “fruit” which has no “sweetness”; and “sweetness” in other things besides “fruits.” Having thus separated ideally the “sweetness” from the “fruit”—which in the concrete sweet-fruit is not permissible—we easily come to imagine a real distinction. This is the case with the concrete living organism when we cease to consider it in its concrete reality, and fix our attention on its abstract terms—Body and Mind. We then think of Body apart from Mind, and believe in them as two Reals, though neither exists apart.
There is no state of consciousness in which object and subject are not indissolubly combined. There is no physical process which is not indissolubly bound up with the psychical modes of apprehending it. Every idea is either an image or a symbol—it has therefore objective reference, a material aspect. Every object is a synthesis of feelings—it has therefore subjective reference, a material aspect. Thus while all the evidence points to the identity of Object and Subject, there is ample evidence for the logical necessity of their ideal separation as Aspects. This I have explained as a case of the general principle which determines all distinctions—namely, the diversity in the modes of production of the products, which—subjectively—is diversity in the modes of apprehending them. The optico-tactical experiences are markedly different from the other experiences, as being more directly referred to the Not-Self which resists; and because these lend themselves to ideal constructions by means of images and symbols, it is these experiences into which we translate all the others when we come to explain them and assign their conditions. For—and this is the central position of our argument—all interpretation consists in translating one set of feelings in the terms of another set. We condense sets of feelings in abstract symbols; to understand these we must reduce them to their concrete significates. They are signs; we must show what they are signs of.
Now the symbols Object and Subject are the most abstract we can employ. Because they are universal, they represent what cannot in reality be divorced. We can, indeed, ideally separate ourselves from the Cosmos; in the same way we can ideally separate our inner Self or Soul from our outer Self or Body; and again our Soul from its sentient states, our Body from its physical changes. But not so in reality. The separation is a logical artifice, and a logical necessity for Science.
The necessity will be obvious to any one who reflects how the ideal constructions of Science demand precision and integrity of terms. The problem of Automatism brings this very clearly into view. The question is, Can we translate all psychological phenomena in mechanical terms? If we can, we ought; because these terms have the immense advantage of being exact, dealing as they do with quantitative relations. But my belief is that we cannot—nay, that we cannot even translate them all into physiological terms. The distinction between quantitative and qualitative knowledge (p. 354) is a barrier against the mechanical interpretation. Physiology is a classificatory science, not a science of measurement. Nor can the laws of Mind be deduced from physiological processes, unless supplemented by and interpreted by psychical conditions individual and social.
CHAPTER IV.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND UNCONSCIOUSNESS.[211]
48. Science demands precision of terms; and in this sense Condillac was justified in defining it, “une langue bien faite.” The sciences of Measurement are exact because of the precision of their terms, and are powerful because of their exactness. The sciences of Classification cannot aspire to this precision, and therefore, although capable of attaining to a fuller knowledge of phenomena than can be reached by their rivals, this advantage of a wider range is accompanied by the disadvantage of a less perfect exposition of results. While physicists and chemists have only to settle the significance of the facts observed, biologists and social theorists have over and above this to settle the significance of the terms they employ in expressing the facts observed. Hence more than half their disputes are at bottom verbal.
This is markedly the case in the question of Automatism. One man declares that animals are automata; another that they are conscious automata; and while it is quite possible to hold these views and not practically be in disagreement with the views of ordinary men, or indeed with the views of spiritualist and materialist philosophers, we can never be sure that the advocates of Automatism do not mean what they are generally understood to mean. If a man says that by an automaton he does not here mean a machine, such as a steam-engine or a watch, but a vital mechanism which has its parts so adjusted that its actions resemble those of a machine; and if he adds that this automaton is also conscious of some of its actions, though unconscious of others, we can only object to his using terms which have misleading connotations. If he mean by “conscious automata,” that animals are mechanisms moved on “purely mechanical principles,” their consciousness having nothing whatever to do with the production of their actions, then indeed our objection is not only to his use of terms, but to his interpretation of the facts.
49. The questions of fact are two: Are animal mechanisms rightfully classed beside machines? and, Is consciousness a coefficient in the actions of animal mechanism? The first has already been answered; the second demands a preliminary settlement of the terms “conscious,” “unconscious,” “voluntary,” and “involuntary.” The aim of Physiology is to ascertain the particular combinations of the elementary parts involved in each particular function—in a word, the mechanism of organic phenomena; and the modern Reflex Theory is an attempt to explain this mechanism on purely mechanical principles, without the co-operation of other principles, especially those of Sensation and Volition. It is greatly aided by the ambiguity of current terms. We are accustomed to speak of certain actions as being performed unconsciously or involuntarily. We are also accustomed to say that Consciousness is necessary to transform an impression into a sensation, and that Volition is the equivalent of conscious effort. When, therefore, unconscious and involuntary actions are recorded, they seem to be actions of an insentient mechanism. The Reflex Theory once admitted, a rigorous logic could not fail to extend it to all animal actions.
50. I reject the Reflex Theory, on grounds hereafter to be urged, but at present call attention to the great ambiguity in the terms “conscious” and “unconscious.” In one sense no definition of Consciousness can be satisfactory, since it designates an ultimate fact, which cannot therefore be made more intelligible than it is already. In another sense no definition is needed, since every one knows what is meant by saying, “I am conscious of such a change, or such a movement.” It is here the equivalent of Feeling. To be conscious of a change, is to feel a change. If we desire to express it in physiological terms, we must define Consciousness—“a function of the organism”; and this definition we shall find eminently useful, because the organism being a vital mechanism, and the integrity of that mechanism being necessary for the integrity of the function, while every variation of the mechanism will bring a corresponding variation of the function, we shall have an objective guide and standard in our inquiries. Organisms greatly differ in complexity, yet because they also agree in the cardinal conditions of Vitality, among which Sensibility is one, we conclude that they all have Feeling; but the Feeling of the one will differ from that of another, according to the complexity of the sentient mechanism in each. The perfection of this mechanism lies in the co-ordination of its parts, and the consensus of its sentient activities; any disturbance of that consensus must cause a modification in the total consciousness; and when the disturbance is profound the modification is marked by such terms as “insanity,” “loss of consciousness,” “insensibility.” These terms do not imply that the sentient organs have lost their Sensibility, but only that the disturbed mechanism has no longer its normal consensus, no longer its normal state of Consciousness. Each organ is active in its own way so long as its own mechanism is preserved; but the united action of the organs having been disturbed, their resultant function has been altered. Hence in a fit of Epilepsy there is a complete absence of some normal reactions, with exaggeration of others. In a state of Coma there is no spontaneity—none of the manifold adaptations of the organism to fluctuating excitations, external and internal, observable in the normal state. The organism still manifests Sensibility—but this is so unlike the manifestations when its mechanism is undisturbed (and necessarily so since the Sensibility varies with the mechanism) that it is no longer called by the same name. In the normal organism Sensibility means Feeling, or Consciousness; but in the abnormal organism there is said to be a “loss of Consciousness.” What the physiologist or the physician means by the phrase “loss of Consciousness” is intelligible, and for his purposes unobjectionable. He observes many organic processes going on undisturbed—the unconscious patient breathes, secretes, moves his limbs, etc. These processes are referred to the parts of the mechanism which are not disturbed; they are obviously independent of that adjustment of the mechanism which by its consensus has the special resultant named Consciousness; he therefore concludes that these, and many other organic processes, which are neither accompanied nor followed by discriminated feelings, are the direct consequences of the stimulated mechanism. He never hesitates to adopt the popular language, and say, “We sometimes act unconsciously, perceive unconsciously, and even think unconsciously, all by the simple reflex of the mechanism.”
Now observe the opening for error in this language. The actions are said to go on unconsciously, and, because unconsciously, as pure reflexes, which are then assigned to an insentient mechanism, and likened to the actions of machines. But, as I hope hereafter to make evident, the reflex mechanism necessarily involves Sensibility; and therefore reflex actions may be unaccompanied by Consciousness—in one meaning of that term—without ceasing to be sentient, the feelings are operative, although not discriminated. On the other hand, there is another and very general meaning of the term Consciousness, which is the equivalent of Sentience.
51. In discussing Automatism, or the Reflex Theory, it is absolutely necessary that we should first settle the meaning we assign to the term Consciousness. The laxity with which the term is used may be seen in the enumeration occupying six pages of Professor Bain’s account of the various meanings. Psychology is often said to be “the science of the facts of Consciousness”; and the Brain is often assigned as “the organ of Consciousness.” Yet there are many mental processes, and many cerebral processes, which are declared to be unconscious. Obviously if Consciousness is the function of the Brain, there can be no cerebral activity which is unconscious; just as there can be no activity of the lungs which is not respiratory. Usage therefore points to a general and a special sense of the term. The general usage identifies it with Sensibility, in its subjective aspect as Sentience, including all psychical states, both those classed under Sensation, and those under Thought. These states are the “facts of consciousness” with which Psychology is occupied. In the special usage it is distinguished from all other psychical states by a peculiar reflected feeling of Attention, whereby we not only have a sensation, but also feel that we have it; we not only think, but are conscious that we are thinking; not only act, but are conscious of what we do. It is this which Kant indicates when he defines it “the subjective form accompanying all our conceptions (Begriffe)”; and Jessen when he defines it “the internal knowing of our knowing, an in itself reflected knowing.”[212]
52. We shall often have to recur to this general and this special meaning, both of which are too firmly rooted for any successful attempt to displace them. The fact that some organic processes and some mental processes take place now consciously and now unconsciously, i. e. now with the feeling of reflected attention, and now with no such feeling, assuredly demands a corresponding expression; nor, in spite of inevitable ambiguities, is there ground for regretting that the expression chosen should be only an extension of the expression already adopted for all other states of Sentience. A sentient or conscious state can only be a state of the sentient organism, itself the unity of many organs, each having its Sensibility. There is more or less consensus, but there is no introduction of a new agent within the organism, converting what was physical impression into mental reaction. From first to last there has been nothing but neural processes, and combinations of such processes—which, viewed subjectively, are sentient processes. Thus the gradations of sensitive reaction are Sentience, Consentience, and Consciousness, which are represented in the Logic of Feeling and the Logic of Signs. The familiar term Conscience will then represent the Logic of Conduct. Thus understood, we may say that a man sometimes acts unconsciously, or thinks unconsciously, although his action and thought are ruled by Consentience, as he sometimes acts and thinks unconscientiously, although he is not without obedience to Conscience on other occasions. The feeling which determines an action is operative, although it may not be discriminated from simultaneous feelings. When this is the case, we say the feeling is unconscious; but this no more means that it is a purely physical process taking place outside the sphere of Sentience, than the immoral conduct of a man would be said to be mechanical, and not the conduct of a moral agent. There is undoubtedly a marked distinction expressed in the terms Consciousness and Unconsciousness, but it is not that of contrasts such as Mental and Physical, it is that of grades such as Light and Darkness. Just as Darkness is a positive optical sensation very different from mere privation—just as it replaces the sensation of Light, blends with it, struggles with it, and in all respects differs from the absence of all optical sensibility in the skin; so Unconsciousness struggles with, blends with, and replaces Consciousness in the organism, and is a positive state of the sentient organism, not to be confounded with a mere negation of Sentience; above all, not to be relegated to merely mechanical processes.
52 a. Remember that, strictly speaking, Consciousness is a psychological not a physiological term, and is only used in Physiology on the assumption that it is the subjective equivalent of an objective process. To avoid the equivoque of “unconscious sensation,” we may substitute the term “unconscious neural process”; and as all neural processes imply Sensibility, which in the subjective aspect is Sentience, we say that Sentience has various modes and degrees—such as Perception, Ideation, Emotion, Volition, which may be conscious, sub-conscious, or unconscious. When Leibnitz referred to the fact of “obscure ideas,” and modern writers expressed this fact as “unconscious cerebration,” the first phrase did not imply a process that was other than mental, the second phrase did not imply a process that was other than physiological: both indicated a mode of the process known as Consciousness under other modes. There are different neural elements grouped in Ideation and Emotion; there are different neural elements grouped in Consciousness, Sub-consciousness, and Unconsciousness; but one tissue with one property is active in all.
53. The nervous organism is affected as a whole by every affection of its constituent parts. Every excitation, instead of terminating with itself—as is the case in most physical processes—or with the motor impulse it excites, is propagated throughout the continuous tissue, and thus sends a thrill throughout the organism. The wave of excitation in passing onwards beats against variously grouped elements—temporary and permanent centres—disturbing their balance more or less, and liberating the energy of some, increasing the tension of others, necessarily affecting all. Those groups which have their energy liberated set up processes that are either discriminated as sensations, or are blended with the general stream, according to their relative energy in the consensus. Thus the impulse on reaching the centres for the heart, lungs, legs, and tail excites the innervation of these organs; but as these are only parts of the organism, and as all the parts enter the consensus, and Consciousness is the varying resultant of this ever-varying consensus, the thrill which any particular stimulus excites will be unconscious, sub-conscious, or conscious, in proportion to the extent of the irradiated disturbance, which will depend on the statical conditions of the centres at the moment. A sound sends a thrill which excites emotion, causes the heart to beat faster, the muscles to quiver, the skin-glands to pour forth their secretion; yet this same sound heard by another man, or the same man under other conditions, physical or historical, merely sends a faint thrill, just vivid enough to detach itself as a sensation from the other simultaneous excitations; and the same sound may excite a thrill which is so faint and fugitive as to pass unconsciously. Physiological and psychological inductions assure us that these are only differences of degree. The same kind of physiological effect accompanies the conscious and unconscious state. Every sensory impression, no matter whether discriminated or not, affects the circulation and develops heat. The blood-vessels of the part impressed expand, vessels elsewhere contract—a change in the blood pressure has been effected, which of course implies that the whole organism has been affected. Delicate instruments show that at the time a sensation is produced the temperature of the brain is raised. The same is true of ideation. Mosso has invented a method of registering the effect of thought on the circulation. He finds ideation accompanied by a contraction of the peripheral vessels proportionate to the degree of intellectual effort. A young man translating Greek showed greater contraction than when he was translating Latin. During sound sleep—when we are said to be unconscious—sudden noises always cause contraction of the peripheral vessels. Psychological observation assures us that the conscious and unconscious states were both consentient, and were both operative in the same degree. The absorbed thinker threads his way through crowded streets, and is sub-conscious and unconscious of the various sights, sounds, touches, and muscular movements which make up so large a portion of his sentient excitation at the time; yet he deftly avoids obstacles, hears the sound of a hurried step behind him, recognizes an interesting object directly it presents itself, and can even recall in Memory many of the uninteresting objects which he passed in sub-conscious and unconscious indifference.
54. On all grounds, therefore, we must say that between conscious, sub-conscious, and unconscious states the difference is only of degree of complication in the neural processes, which by relative preponderance in the consensus determine a relative discrimination. We can only discriminate one thrill at a time; but the neural excitations simultaneously pressing towards a discharge are many; and the conditions which determine now this, and now the other excitation to predominate by its differential pressure, are far beyond any mechanical estimate. I mention this because the advocates of the Reflex Theory maintain that the neural processes are the same whether a sensation be produced or not; and that since the same actions follow the external stimulation whether sensation be produced or not, this proves the actions to be purely mechanical. I reply, the neural processes are not the same throughout in the two cases—otherwise the effects would be the same. You might as well say, “Since the explosion of the gun is the same, whether shotted or not, a blank cartridge will kill”; but if you tell me that your gun killed the bird, I declare that the cartridge was not a blank one. Whether the explosion of the gun also produced terror in one bystander, curiosity in a second, and attracted no notice from a third, will be altogether another matter. In like manner the sensory impression which determines a movement may or may not be accompanied or followed by other sentient states; the fact of such movement is evidence of its sentient antecedent; and an external stimulus that will produce this neural process, and this consequent movement, must produce a feeling, although not necessarily a discriminated sensation. Now since, for discrimination, other neural processes must co-operate, we cannot say that in the two cases all the neural processes have been the same throughout; nor because of this difference can we say that the process of the undiscriminated sensation is a mechanical, not a sentient process. In the next problem this point will be argued more fully.
55. The need of recognizing Consciousness and Consentience as degrees of energy and complexity in sentient states is apparent when we consider animal phenomena. Has a bee consciousness? Has a snail volition? or are they both insentient mechanisms? All inductions warrant the assertion that a bee has thrills propagated throughout its organism by the agency of its nerves; and that some of these thrills are of the kind called sensations—even discriminated sensations. Nevertheless we may reasonably doubt whether the bee has sentient states resembling otherwise than remotely the sensations, emotions, and thoughts which constitute human Consciousness, either in the general or the special sense of that term. The bee feels and reacts on feelings; but its feelings cannot closely resemble our own, because the conditions in the two cases are different. The bee may even be said to think (in so far as Thought means logical combination of feelings), for it appears to form Judgments in the sphere of the Logic of Feeling—το νοητικὸν; although incapable of the Logic of Signs—το διανοητικον. We should therefore say the bee has Consentience, but not Consciousness—unless we accept Consciousness in its general signification as the equivalent of Sentience. The organism of the bee differs from that of a man, as a mud hut from a marble palace. But since underlying these differences there are fundamental resemblances, the functions of the two will be fundamentally alike. Both have the function of Sentience; as mud hut and palace have both the office of sheltering.
56. The question of Volition will occupy us in the next chapter. Restricting ourselves here to that of Consciousness, and recalling the distinction of the two meanings of the term, we now approach the question of Unconsciousness. Are we to understand this term as designating a purely physical state in contrast to the purely mental state of Consciousness; or only as designating a difference of degree? This is like asking whether Light and Darkness are both optical feelings, or one an optical feeling and the other a physical process? On the Reflex Theory, no sooner does a vital and mental process pass from the daylight of Consciousness, or twilight of Sub-consciousness, into the darkness of Unconsciousness, than the whole order of phenomena is abruptly changed, they cease to be vital, mental, and lapse into physical, mechanical processes. The grounds of this conclusion are, first, the unpsychological assumption that the unconscious state is out of the sphere of Sentience; and secondly, the unphysiological assumption that the Brain is the only portion of the nervous system which has the property of Sensibility. Restate the conclusion in different terms and its fallacy emerges: “organic processes suddenly cease to be organic, and become purely physical by a slight change in their relative position in the consensus; the organic process which was a conscious sensation a moment ago, when its energy was not balanced by some other process, suddenly falls from its place in the group of organic phenomena—sentient phenomena—to sink into the group of inorganic phenomena now that its energy is balanced.” Consider the parallel case of Motion and Rest in the objective sphere. They are two functions of the co-operant forces, one dynamic, the other static; although markedly distinguishable as functions, we know that they are simply the co-operant forces now unbalanced and now balanced; what we call Rest is also a product of moving forces, each of which is operant, and will issue in a definite resultant when its counter-force is removed. Motion and Rest are correlatives, and both belong to the sphere of Kinetics. In like manner Consciousness and Unconsciousness are correlatives, both belonging to the sphere of Sentience.[213] Every one of the unconscious processes is operant, changes the general state of the organism, and is capable of at once issuing in a discriminated sensation when the force which balances it is disturbed. I was unconscious of the scratch of my pen in writing the last sentence, but I am distinctly conscious of every scratch in writing this one. Then, as now, the scratching sound sent a faint thrill through my organism, but its relative intensity was too faint for discrimination; now that I have redistributed the co-operant forces, by what is called an act of Attention, I hear distinctly every sound the pen produces.
57. The inclusion of Sub-consciousness within the sentient sphere is obvious; the inclusion of Unconsciousness within that sphere may be made so, when we consider its modes of production, and compare it with the extra-sensible conception of molecules and atoms. The Matter which is sensible as masses, may be resolved into molecules, which lie beyond the discrimination of sense; and these again into atoms, which are purely ideal conceptions; but because molecules are proved, and atoms are supposed, to have material properties, and to conform to sensible canons of the objective world, we never hesitate to class them under the head of Matter; nor do we imagine that in passing beyond the discrimination of Sense they lose their objective significance. They are still physical, not mental facts. So with Sentience: we may trace it through infinite gradations from Consciousness to Sub-consciousness, till it fades away in Unconsciousness; but from first to last the processes have been those of a sentient organism; and by this are broadly distinguished from all processes in anorganisms. The movement of a limb has quite different modes of production from the movement of a wheel; and among its modes must be included those of Sensibility, a peculiarly vital property. Oxidation may be slow or rapid, manifesting itself as combustion, heat, or flame, but it is always oxidation—always a special chemical phenomenon. And so the neural process of Sentience, whether conscious, sub-conscious, or unconscious, is always a state of the sentient organism. If a material process does not change its character, and become spiritual, on passing beyond the range of sensible appreciation, why should a psychical process become material on passing beyond the range of discrimination? If we admit molecules as physical units, sentient tremors are psychical units. The extra-sensible molecules have indeed their subjective aspect, and only enter perception through the “greeting of the spirit.” The sentient tremors have also their objective aspect, and cannot come into existence without the neural tremors, which are their physical conditions.
58. It is only by holding fast to such a conception that we can escape the many difficulties and contradictions presented by unconscious phenomena, and explain many physiological and psychological processes. Descartes—followed by many philosophers—identified Consciousness with Thought. To this day we constantly hear that to have a sensation, and to be conscious of it, is one and the same state; which is only admissible on the understanding that Consciousness means Sentience, and Sentience the activity of the nervous system viewed subjectively. Leibnitz pointed out that we have many psychical states which are unconscious states—to have an idea and be conscious of it, are, he said, not one but two states. The Consciousness by Descartes erected into an essential condition of Thought, was by Leibnitz reduced to an accompaniment which not only may be absent, but in the vast majority of cases is absent. The teaching of most modern psychologists is that Consciousness forms but a small item in the total of psychical processes. Unconscious sensations, ideas, and judgments are made to play a great part in their explanations. It is very certain that in every conscious volition—every act that is so characterized—the larger part of it is quite unconscious. It is equally certain that in every perception there are unconscious processes of reproduction and inference—there is much that is implicit, some of which cannot be made explicit—a “middle distance” of sub-consciousness, and a “background” of unconsciousness. But, throughout, the processes are those of Sentience.
59. Unconsciousness is by some writers called latent Consciousness. Experiences which are no longer manifested are said to be stored up in Memory, remaining in the Soul’s picture-gallery, visible directly the shutters are opened. We are not conscious of these feelings, yet they exist as latent feelings, and become salient through association. As a metaphorical expression of the familiar facts of Memory this may pass; but it has been converted from a metaphor into an hypothesis, and we are supposed to have feelings and ideas, when in fact we have nothing more than a modified disposition of the organism—temporary or permanent—which when stimulated will respond in this modified manner. The modification of the organism when permanent becomes hereditary; and its response is then called an instinctive or automatic action. And as actions pass by degrees from conscious and voluntary into sub-conscious and sub-voluntary, and finally into unconscious and involuntary, we call them volitional, secondarily automatic, and automatic. If any one likes to say the last are due to latent consciousness, I shall not object. I only point to the fact that the differences here specified are simply differences of degree—all the actions are those of the sentient organism.
60. Picture to yourself this sentient organism incessantly stimulated from without and from within, and adjusting itself in response to such stimulations. In the blending of stimulations, modifying and arresting each other, there is a fluctuating “composition of forces,” with ever-varying resultants. Besides the stream of direct stimulations, there is a wider stream of indirect or reproduced stimulations. Together with the present sensation there is always a more or less complex group of revived sensations, the one group of neural tremors being organically stimulated by the other. An isolated excitation is impossible in a continuous nervous tissue; an isolated feeling is impossible in the consensus or unity of the sentient organism. The term Soul is the personification of this complex of present and revived feelings, and is the substratum of Consciousness (in the general sense), all the particular feelings being its states. To repeat an illustration used in my first volume, we may compare Consciousness to a mass of stationary waves. If the surface of a lake be set in motion each wave diffuses itself over the whole surface, and finally reaches the shores, whence it is reflected back towards the centre of the lake. This reflected wave is met by the fresh incoming waves, there is a blending of the waves, and their product is a pattern on the surface. This pattern of stationary waves is a fluctuating pattern, because of the incessant arrival of fresh waves, incoming and reflected. Whenever a fresh stream enters the lake (i. e. a new sensation is excited from without), its waves will at first pass over the pattern, neither disturbing it nor being disturbed by it; but after reaching the shore the waves will be reflected back towards the centre, and there will more or less modify the pattern.
CHAPTER V.
VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY ACTIONS.
61. Much of what has been said in the preceding chapter respecting the passive side of the organism is equally applicable to the active side. Our actions are classed as voluntary and involuntary mainly in reference to their being consciously or unconsciously performed; but not wholly so, for there are many involuntary actions of which we are distinctly conscious, and many voluntary actions of which we are at times sub-conscious and unconscious. I do not propose here to open the long and arduous discussion as to what constitutes Volition, my present purpose being simply that of fixing the meaning of terms, so that the question of Automatism may not be complicated by their ambiguities. “Voluntary” and “involuntary” are, like “conscious” and “unconscious,” correlative terms; but commonly, instead of being understood as indicating differences of degree in phenomena of the same order, they are supposed to indicate differences of kind—a new agent, the Will, being understood in the one case to direct the Mechanism which suffices without direction in the other.
62. This interpretation is unphysiological and unpsychological, since it overlooks the fact that both voluntary and involuntary actions belong to the same order of phenomena, i. e. those of the sentient organism. Both involve the same efficient cause, i. e. co-operant conditions. We draw a line of demarcation between the two abstractions—as between all abstractions—but the concrete processes they symbolize have no such demarcation. Just as the thought which at one moment passes unconsciously, at another consciously, is in itself the same thought, and the same neural process; so the action which at one moment is voluntary, and at another involuntary, is itself the same action, performed by the same mechanism. The incitation which precedes, and the feeling which accompanies the action, belong to the accessory mechanisms, and may be replaced by other incitations and other feelings; as the fall of an apple is the same event, involving the same conditions, i. e. efficient cause, whether the occasional cause be a gust of wind or the gardener’s scissors, and whether the fall be seen and heard or not. I may utter words intentionally and consciously, and I may utter the same words automatically, unconsciously; I may wink voluntarily, and wink involuntarily. There are terms to express these differences; but they do not express a difference in the efficient agencies.
63. Many writers seem to think that the involuntary actions belong to the physical mechanical order, because they are not stimulated by cerebral incitations, and cannot be regulated or controlled by such incitations—or as the psychologists would say, because Consciousness in the form of Will is no agent prompting and regulating such actions. But I think this untenable. The actions cannot belong to the mechanical order so long as they are the actions of a vital mechanism, and so long as we admit the broad distinction between organisms and anorganisms. Whether they have the special character of Consciousness or not, they have the general character of sentient actions, being those of a sentient mechanism. And this becomes the more evident when we consider the gradations of the phenomena. Many, if not all, of those actions which are classed under the involuntary were originally of the voluntary class—either in the individual or his ancestors; but having become permanently organized dispositions—the pathways of stimulation and reaction having been definitely established—they have lost that volitional element (of hesitation and choice) which implies regulation and control. But even here a slight change in the habitual conditions will introduce a disturbance in the process which may awaken Consciousness, and the sense of effort, sometimes even causing control. An instinctive or an automatic action may be thus changed, or arrested. Take as an example one of the unequivocally automatic actions, that of Breathing. It is called automatic because, like the actions of an automaton, it is performed by a definitely constructed mechanism, always working in the same way when stimulated and left to itself. There must of course be a sense of effort in every impulse which has resistance to overcome, organs to be moved; but the mechanism of Breathing is so delicately adjusted, that the sense of effort is reduced to a minimum, and we are unconscious of it, or sub-conscious of it. Nevertheless, without altering the rate or amplitude of the inspirations and expirations, we become distinctly conscious of them, and, moreover, within certain limits we can control them, so that the Breathing passes from the involuntary to the voluntary class.
64. Pass on to other examples. What action can be more involuntary than the rhythmic movements of the heart and the contractions of the iris? Compared with the actions of the tongue or limbs, these seem riveted by an iron necessity, freed from all consciousness and control. Yet the movements of the heart are not only stimulated by sensations and thoughts, they are also capable of being felt; and the movements both of heart and iris are not wholly removed from our control. That we do not habitually control (that is, interfere with) the action of the heart, the contraction of the iris, or the activity of a gland, is true; it is on this account that such actions are called involuntary; they obey the immediate stimulus. But it is an error to assert that these actions cannot be controlled, that they are altogether beyond the interference of other centres, and cannot by any effort of ours be modified. It is an error to suppose these actions are essentially distinguished from the voluntary movement of the hands. We have acquired a power of definite direction in the movements of the hands, which renders them obedient to our will; but this acquisition has been of slow laborious growth. If we were asked to use our toes as we use our fingers—to grasp, paint, sew, or write with them, we should find it not less impossible to control the movements of the toes in these directions, than to contract the iris, or cause a burst of perspiration to break forth. Certain movements of the toes are possible to us; but unless the loss of our fingers has made it necessary that we should use our toes in complicated and slowly acquired movements, we can do no more with them than the young infant can do with his fingers. Yet men and women have written, sewed, and painted with their toes. All that is requisite is that certain links should be established between sensations and movements; by continual practice these links are established; and what is impossible to the majority of men, becomes easy to the individual who has acquired this power. This same power can be acquired over what are called the organic actions; nevertheless the habitual needs of life do not tend towards such acquisition, and without some strong current setting in that direction, or some peculiarity of organization rendering it easy, it is never acquired. In ordinary circumstances the number of those who can write with their toes is extremely rare, the urgent necessity which would create such a power being rare; and rare also are the examples of those who have any control over the movement of the iris, or the action of a gland; but both rarities exist.
It would be difficult to choose a more striking example of reflex action than the contraction of the iris of the eye under the stimulus of light;[214] and to ordinary men, having no link established which would guide them, it is utterly impossible to close the iris by any effort. It would be not less impossible to the hungry child to get on the chair and reach the food on the table, until that child had learned how to do so. Yet there are men who have learned how to contract the iris. The celebrated Fontana had this power; which is possessed also by a medical man now living at Kilmarnock—Dr. Paxton—a fact authenticated by no less a person than Dr. Allen Thomson.[215] Dr. Paxton can contract or expand the iris at will, without changing the position of his eye, and without an effort of adaptation to distance.
To move the ears is impossible to most men. Yet some do it with ease, and all could learn to do it. Some men have learned to “ruminate” their food; others to vomit with ease; and some are said to have the power of perspiring at will.[216] Now, if once we recognize a link of sensation and motion, we recognize a possible source of control; and if the daily needs of life were such that to fulfil some purpose the action of the heart required control, we should learn to control it. Some men have, without such needs, learned how to control it. The eminent physiologist, E. F. Weber of Leipzig, found that he could completely check the beating of his heart. By suspending his breath and violently contracting his chest, he could retard the pulsations; and after three or five beats, unaccompanied by any of the usual sounds, it was completely still. On one occasion he carried the experiment too far, and fell into a syncope. Cheyne, in the last century, recorded the case of a patient of his own who could at will suspend the beating of his pulse, and always fainted when he did so.
65. It thus appears that even the actions which most distinctly bear the character recognized as involuntary—uncontrollable—are only so because the ordinary processes of life furnish no necessity for their control. We do not learn to control them, though we could do so, to some extent; nor do we learn to control the motions of our ears, although we could do so. And while it appears that the involuntary actions can become voluntary, it is familiar to all that the voluntary actions tend, by constant repetition, to become involuntary. Thus involuntary actions, under certain limitations, may be controlled; on the other hand, the voluntary are incapable of being controlled under the urgency of direct stimulation. Both are reflexes.
Inasmuch as almost all actions are the products of stimulated nerve-centres, it is obvious that these actions are reflex—reflected from those centres. It matters not whether I wink because a sensation of dryness, or because an idea of danger, causes the eyelid to close: the act is equally reflex. The nerve-centre which supplies the eyelid with its nerve has been stimulated; the stimuli may be various, the act is uniform. At one time the stimulus is a sensation of dryness, at another an idea of danger, at another the idea of communicating by means of a wink with some one present; in each case the stimulus is reflected in a muscular contraction. Sensations excite other sensations; ideas excite other ideas; and one of these ideas may issue in an action of control. But the restraining power is limited, and cannot resist a certain degree of urgency in the original stimulus. I can, for a time, restrain the act of winking, in spite of the sensation of dryness; but the reflex which sets going this restraining action will only last a few seconds; after which, the urgency of the external stimulus is stronger than that of the reflex feeling—the sensation of dryness is more imperious than the idea of resistance—and the eyelid drops.
If a knife be brought near the arm of a man who has little confidence in the friendly intentions of him that holds it, he shrinks, and the shrinking is “involuntary,” i. e. in spite of his will. Let him have confidence, and he does not shrink, even when the knife touches his skin. The idea of danger is not excited in the second case, or if excited, is at once banished by another idea. Yet this very man, who can thus repress the involuntary shrinking when the knife approaches his arm, cannot repress the involuntary winking when the same friend approaches a finger to his eye. In vain he prepares himself to resist that reflex action; in vain he resolves to resist the impulse; no sooner does the finger approach, than down flashes the eyelid. Many men, and most women, would be equally unable to resist shrinking on the approach of a knife: the association of the idea of danger with the knife would bear down any previous resolution not to shrink. It is from this cause that timorous women tremble at the approach of firearms. An association is established in their minds which no idea is powerful enough to loosen. You may assure them the gun is not loaded; “that makes very little difference,” said a naïve old lady to a friend of mine. They tremble, as the child trembles when he sees you put on the mask. These illustrations show that the urgency of any one idea may, like the urgency of a sensation, bear down the resistance offered by some other idea; as the previous illustrations showed that an idea could restrain or control the action which a sensation or idea would otherwise have produced. According to the doctrines current, the Will is said to be operative when an idea determines an action; and yet all would agree that the winking which was involuntary when the idea of danger determined it, was voluntary when the idea of communicating with an accomplice in some mystification determined it.
66. There is no real and essential distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions. They all spring from Sensibility. They are all determined by feeling. It is convenient, for common purposes, to designate some actions as voluntary; but this is merely a convenience; no psychological nor physiological insight is gained by it; an analysis of the process discloses no element in a voluntary action which is not to be found in an involuntary action—except in the origin or degree of stimulation. In ordinary language it is convenient to mark a distinction between my raising my arm because I will to raise it for some definite purpose, and my raising it because a bee has stung me; it is convenient to say, “I will to write this letter,” and “this letter is written against my will—I have no will in the matter.” But Science is more exacting when it aims at being exact; and the philosopher, analyzing these complex actions, will find that in each case certain muscular groups have been set in action by different sensational or ideational stimuli. The action itself is that of a neuro-muscular mechanism, which mechanism works in the same way, whatever be the source of the original impulse. The stimulation may be incited directly from the periphery, or indirectly from a remote centre; and the action may be arrested by a peripheral or central stimulation: the reflex which ordinarily follows the excitation of a sensory nerve will be modified, or arrested, if some other nerve be at the same time stimulated. (See Law of Arrest, Prob. II. § [190].)
67. All actions are reflex, all are the operations of a mechanism, all are sentient, because the mechanism has Sensibility as its vital property. In thus preserving the integrity of the order of vital phenomena, and keeping them classified apart from physical and chemical phenomena, we by no means set aside the useful distinctions expressed in the terms voluntary and involuntary; any more than we set aside the distinction of vertebrate and invertebrate when both are classed under Animal, and separated from Plant, or Planet.
The mechanisms of the special Senses respond in special reactions; the mechanisms of special actions have also their several responses. The tail responds to stimulation with lateral movements, the chest with inspiration and expiration, and so on. These responses are called automatic, and have this in common with the actions of automata that they are uniform, and do not need the co-operation of Consciousness, though they do need the operation of Sensibility, and are thereby distinguished from the actions of automata. The facial muscles, and the limbs, also respond to stimulation in uniform ways, but owing to the varieties of stimulation the actions are more variable, and have more the character of volitional movements. With this greater freedom of possible action comes the eminently mental character of choice. In the cerebral rehearsal of an act not yet performed—its mental prevision—as when we intend to do something, yet for the moment arrest the act, so that there is only a nascent excitation of the motor process, there is a peculiar state of Consciousness expressive of this state of the mechanism: we call the prevision a motive—and it becomes a motor when the intention is realized, the nascent excitation becomes an unchecked impulse. The abstract of all motives we call Will. A motive is a volition in the sphere of the Intellect. In the sphere of Emotion it is a motor. Hence we never speak of the Will of a mollusc, or the motives of an insect, only of their sensations and motors. Yet it is obvious that the reflex in operation when a snail shrinks at the approach of an object is essentially similar to the reflex in operation when the baby shrinks, and this again is still more similar to that in operation when the boy shrinks: the boy has the idea of danger, which neither baby nor snail can have; the idea is a motive, which can be controlled by another idea; the baby and the snail can have no such motive, no such control—are they therefore automata?
68. If I see that a donkey has wandered into my garden, the motive which determines me to take a stick and with it drive the donkey away is a cerebral rehearsal of the effects which will follow my act. The sight of the donkey has roused disagreeable feelings, and these suggest possible means of alleviation; out of these possibilities—reproductions of former experiences—I choose one. But if I seize the stick with which some one is threatening me, I do not pause to choose, I snatch automatically without hesitation. Yet this unreflecting automatic act is itself as truly volitional as my seizing the stick to drive away the donkey—it is the motor which has been organized in me by previous experiences—it is the consequence of an emotion, not of a deliberation; and it has not been determined by any clear prevision of consequences. Feeling inspires, and feeling guides my movements, so that if my snatch has missed the stick, I snatch again, or duck under. This is the kind of Volition we ascribe to animals. It is a great part of our own. By insensible degrees, acts which originally were prompted by motives sink into the automatic class prompted by motors. When an angry man snatches up a knife, doffs bystanders aside, and rushes on his enemy to stab him, he does not distinctly prefigure the final result, he only obeys each motor, and is conscious of each step; but had he planned the murder he would have foreseen the end, and this prevision would have been the motive. The angry man is struck with horror at the sight of the bleeding corpse, and passionately declares he did not mean to kill. Nor did he will the consequences of his act, yet he certainly willed each separate step—he recognized the knife, saw the bystanders, knew they would interfere with him, willed to push them aside. He may be right in declaring that the act was involuntary; but assuredly it was not purely mechanical.
69. Again, we are not conscious of the separate sensations which guide speech or writing; we cannot properly be said to will the utterance of each tone, or the formation of each letter. Are these processes mechanical and not volitional? By no means. We know that they were laboriously learned by long tentative efforts, each of which was accompanied by distinct consciousness. We also know that now when the mechanism is so easy in its adjustment as to suggest automatism, there needs but a slight alteration in the conditions to make us distinctly conscious of the processes—the wrong word spoken, or one letter ill formed, suffices to arrest the easy working of the mechanism. A similar mechanism operates in thinking, which also lapses from the conscious and voluntary to the unconscious and involuntary state. The logical process of Judgment is as purely a reflex from one neural group to another, as the physiological process of co-ordination. In ordinary thinking we are as little conscious of the particular steps—our interest being concentrated on the result—as we are of the particular stages of an action. The adjustments of the mechanism of Reproduction and Association are set going by a motive, and kept going by psychological motors. And here—as in bodily actions—there is often a conflict between motive and motors—between the foreseen result, and the available means of reaching it—the motors usually prevailing because they represent the active side of the mechanism. Thus when an oculist wishes to examine a patient’s eye, he does not tell him to give a particular direction to his eye, knowing that the motive to do so will not suffice; instead of this he simply moves his own hand in the desired direction, certain that the eye will by reflex irresistibly follow it. Nay, there are sometimes such anomalies of innervation that the eye, instead of obeying the motive, moves in a contrary direction. Meschede mentions a patient whose movements were mostly of this anomalous kind: when he willed to move the eyes to the right, they moved to the left; when he willed to move them up, they moved down. It was thus also with his hands and feet. Yet he was distinctly conscious that his intention had been frustrated, and that he acted “because he could not help it.”[217] How insensibly a motive sinks into a motor, that is to say, a voluntary into an involuntary act, may be recognized in speech, writing, singing, walking, etc., and in the incessant movements of the eye in fixing objects. Aubert has well remarked that we only give definite movements to the eye when we wish to see an object distinctly. Whenever the indistinct vision suffices—as in walking through the streets occupied in conversation or thought—we make no such movements; but no sooner does any object excite our attention, than the effort to fix that object at once excites the necessary reflex.[218]
70. By the Will, then, we must understand the abstract generalized expression of the impulses which determine actions, when those impulses have an ideal origin; by Volition the still more generalized expression of all impulses which determine actions. The one class is that of motives with ideal elements; the other that of motors with sensational or emotional elements. But both are mental states, both are neural processes in a sentient organism; neither is mechanical, except in so far as all actions are expressible in mechanical terms. For convenience we class actions as reflex, automatic, involuntary, unconscious, voluntary, and conscious. If we separate the reflex from the voluntary, we need not therefore dissociate the former from Sensibility; and the reason why we ought not to separate it is that we know it to be sense-guided from first to last, although the sensations may escape discrimination. The feeling of Effort, which was formerly felt when an action was performed, may have become so minimized that it is too faint for more than a momentary consciousness, too evanescent for the memory to retain it; yet the feeling must always be operant when its mechanism is in action. The ease with which the mechanism works does not change the adjustment of its elements, nor alter its character. The facile unobtrusive performance of a vital function does not change it from a vital to a mechanical act. Mr. Spencer seems to me to express himself ambiguously when he says: “Just as any set of psychical changes originally displaying Memory, Reason, and Feeling cease to be conscious, rational, and emotional as fast as they by repetition grow closely organized, so do they at the same time pass beyond the sphere of Volition. Memory, Reason, Feeling, and Will disappear in proportion as psychical changes become automatic”[219]—for while it is perfectly true that we only call those psychical changes “automatic” which have lost the special qualities called “conscious, rational, and emotional,” it is not less true that they remain from first to last psychical changes, and are thereby distinguished from physical changes. To suppose that they pass from the psychical to the physical by frequent repetition would lead to the monstrous conclusion that when a naturalist has by laborious study become so familiarized with the specific marks of an animal or plant that he can recognize at a glance a particular species, or recognize from a single character the nature of the rest, the rapidity and certainty of this judgment proves it to be a mechanical, not a mental act. The intuition with which a mathematician sees the solution of a problem would then be a mechanical process, while the slow and bungling hesitation of the tyro in presence of the same problem would be a mental process: the perfection of the organism would thus result in its degradation to the level of a machine!
The operations of the intellect may furnish us with an illustration. Ideas are symbols of sensations. The idea of a horse is an abstraction easily traceable to concrete sensations, yet as an abstraction is so different a state of feeling that we only identify it with its concretes by a careful study of its stages of evolution, namely, sensation, image, reproduced images resembling yet differing from the original sensation, a coalescence of their resemblances, and finally the substitution of a verbal symbol for these images. With this symbol the intellect operates, and sometimes operates so exclusively with it that not the faintest trace of image or sensation is appreciable—the word horse takes the place of the image in the sequence of sensorial processes, just as the image takes the place of the sensation. It does this as a neural equivalent. In the same way we substitute verbal symbols for a bag of sovereigns when we pay a creditor with a check; he pays the check away to another; and this monetary equivalent passes from hand to hand without a single coin making its appearance. Does the transaction cease to be commercial, monetary, in this substitution of signs? No; nor does a process cease to be psychical when an image is substituted for a sensation, and a verbal symbol for an image. This every one will admit. Must we not go further, and extend the admission to automatic actions which originally were voluntary, and have now lost all trace of ideal prevision, and almost all traces of accompanying consciousness? The motor mechanism has its symbols also; in this sense, that whereas the action which at first needed complex sensorial processes to set it going and keep it going, is now determined by a single one of those processes taking the place of their resultant. When a practised accountant runs his eye up a column of figures, he does not pause to realize the values of those figures by decomposing the symbols into their numerical units, he simply groups one symbol with another according to their intuited relations, and the final result is reached with a certainty not less, and a rapidity far greater, than if it had been reached by step-by-step verification. It is thus with the pianoforte-player. It is thus with all automatic performances, except those dependent on the connate adjustments of the mechanism.
CHAPTER VI.
THE PROBLEM STATED.
71. If the preceding attempt to disengage the question from the ambiguities of its terms has been successful, we shall find little difficulty in rationally interpreting all the facts adduced in favor of Animal Automatism, without having recourse to a mechanical theory of biological phenomena. The objections to that theory are that it employs terms which have very misleading connotations even when they do not denote phenomena of widely different orders; so that the moral repugnance commonly felt at the attempt to treat the animal organism as if it were a machine, is sustained by the intellectual repugnance at the attempt to explain biological phenomena on principles derived from phenomena of a simpler order.
Remark, in passing, this piquant contradiction: the Automaton theory of Descartes, when applied to the animals, generally excited ridicule or repulsion; whereas the far more inconsistent and mechanical theory of Reflex Action has been almost universally welcomed as a great discovery, though it banishes the Sensibility which Descartes preserved. And further, the philosophers who most loudly protested against the idea that animals were machines, were the philosophers who most insisted that these animals were made, not evolved—planned by their maker, as a watch is planned by its maker, with a distinct purpose and prevision in the disposition of every part; whereas the philosophers who most emphatically reject this notion of organisms being made, are often those who liken organisms to machines.
72. The paradox propounded by Descartes loses much of its strangeness when we understand his meaning. Its terms are infelicitous because of their misleading connotations. When he says that all the actions of animals which seem to be due to Consciousness are in fact produced on the same principles as those of a machine, he means that animals have not souls to direct their actions; but since, on being questioned, he is ready to admit that animals have sensation, perception, emotion, and memory, his denial of their souls practically comes to much the same as the ordinary position that animals have not Thought nor Consciousness of Self.[220] The admission of sensation is, however, quite enough to mark the essential difference between an organism and a machine.
73. It was really a great step taken by Descartes when he directed attention to the fact that all animal actions were executed in strict conformity with mechanical principles, because both before his time, and since, we may observe a great disregard of the animal mechanism, and a disposition to interpret the phenomena on metaphysical principles. But the connotations of the term “machine” were such as to lead the mind away from the special conditions of the vital mechanism, and fix it exclusively on the general conditions of machinery. Hence his opponents misunderstood him, and some of his followers made the same oversight, and ended by eliminating sensation altogether. In pursuance of this mechanical point of view, to the exclusion of the biological, Thought and even Consciousness have been eliminated from among the organic agencies, and are said to have no more influence in determining even human actions than the whistle of the steam-engine has in directing the locomotive. There are thus two metaphysiological theories. According to the one, Consciousness directs indeed the actions of the organism, but is not itself an organic process—it sits apart, like a musical performer playing on an instrument. According to the other, it is not a directing agency, but an accessory product of certain organic processes, which processes may go on quite as well without any accompaniment and interference of Consciousness.
74. Two observations arise here. First, we observe a want of due recognition of the objective and subjective aspects, and their respective criteria. Secondly, we observe mental facts of irresistible certainty interpreted by material hypotheses of questionable value; and not only so, but a higher validity is assigned to the material hypotheses than to the mental facts they are invented to explain. That we are conscious, and that our actions are determined by sensations, emotions, and ideas, are facts which may or may not be explained by reference to material conditions, but which no material explanation can render more certain. That animals resemble us in this as in other respects is an induction of the highest probability. It is also a fact that many actions take place, as we say, unconsciously and involuntarily; and that some take place now consciously, now unconsciously. These facts also we endeavor to explain: and when we find that some of the unconscious and involuntary actions take place after the brain has been removed, this is interpreted on the material hypothesis of the brain being the sole seat of sensation and consciousness; and is urged in favor of the hypothesis that consciousness cannot be an agent in the mechanism. Here the confusion of objective and subjective aspects is patent. Consciousness as a subjective fact cannot be a material or objective fact. But may it not be another aspect of that which is objective? So long as we are dealing with the objective aspect, we have nothing but material processes in a material mechanism before us. A change within the organism is caused by a neural stimulation, and the resulting action is a reflex on the muscles. Here there is simply a transference of motion by a material mechanism. There is in this no evidence of a subjective agency; there could be none. But when we come to investigate the process, we find that it differs from similar processes in anorganisms, by the necessary co-operation of special conditions, and among these—the vital conditions—there are those which in their subjective aspect we express not in terms of Matter and Motion, but in terms of Feeling, i. e. not in objective but in subjective terms. I see a stone move on being struck; I also see a man shrink on being struck, and hear a dog howl on being kicked. I do not infer that the stone feels as the man and dog feel, because I know the stone and the dog to be differently constituted, and infer a corresponding difference in their reactions. I infer that the man and dog feel, because I know they are like myself, and conclude that what I feel they feel, under like conditions.
75. Descartes says that animals are sensitive automata. They always act as we sometimes act, i. e. when we are not conscious of what we do, as in singing, walking, playing the piano, etc. We are said to do these things mechanically, automatically, and hence the conclusion that these actions are those of a pure mechanism. But it would be truer to say that we never act mechanically, we always act organically. “When one who falls from a height throws his hands forwards to save his head,” says Descartes, “it is in virtue of no ratiocination that he performs this action” (that depends on the definition: in the Logic of Feeling there is a process of ratiocination identical with that in the Logic of Signs). “It does not depend upon his mind” (again a question of definition), “but takes place merely because his senses being affected by present danger” (senses, then, have a perception of danger?) “some change arises in his brain which determines the animal spirits to pass thence into the nerves in such a manner as is required to produce this motion, in the same way as in a machine, and without his mind being able to hinder it. Now since we observe this in ourselves, why should we be so much astonished if the light reflected from the body of a wolf into the eye of a sheep has the same force to excite in it the motion of flight?”
Here, both in the case of the man and the sheep, there is presupposed the very mental experience which is denied. The young child will not throw out its arm to protect itself; but after many experiences of falling and stumbling, there is an organized perception of the impending danger, and the means of averting it, and it is this which determines the throwing out of the arms. If this is not a mental fact—a process of judgment—then the logical conclusion by which a financier on hearing a war rumor orders his broker to sell stock, is not a mental fact. The light reflected from the body of a wolf would not disturb the sheep unless its own, or its inherited organized experience were ready there to respond. But this organized experience, you say, enters into the mechanism? Yes; but it cannot be made to enter into the mechanism of an automaton, because however complex that mechanism may be, and however capable of variety of action, it is constructed solely for definite actions on calculated lines: all its readjustments must have been foreseen, it is incapable of adjusting itself to unforeseen circumstances. Hence every interruption in the prearranged order either throws it out of gear, or brings it to a standstill. It is regulated, not self-regulating. The organism, on the contrary—conspicuously so in its more complex forms—is variable, self-regulating, incalculable. It has selective adaptation (p. 221) responding readily and efficiently to novel and unforeseen circumstances; acquiring new modes of combination and reaction. An automaton that will learn by experience, and adapt itself to conditions not calculated for in its construction, has yet to be made; till it is made, we must deny that organisms are machines. Automatism in the organism implies Memory and Perception. A sudden contact—a sudden noise—a vague form seen in the twilight will excite the mechanism according to its organized experiences. We start automatically, before we automatically interpret the cause; we start first, and then ask, What is that? But we do not always start at sounds or sights which have no association with previous experiences. The child and the man both see the falling glass, but the child does not automatically stretch out a hand to save the glass. Having once learned the action of swimming or billiard-playing, we automatically execute these; without consciously remembering the rules, we unconsciously obey them; each feeling as it rises is linked on to another, each muscle is combined with others in a remembered synthesis.
76. Kempelen’s chess-player surprised the public, but every instructed physiologist present knew that in some way or other its movements were directed by a human mind; simply because no machine could possibly have responded to the unforeseen fluctuations of the human mind opposed to it. Even the mind of a dog or a savage would be incompetent to pass beyond the range of its previous experiences, incompetent to seize the significance of an adversary’s moves on the chessboard. Now just as we conclude that mental agency is essential to a game of chess, so we conclude that Sensibility is essential to the fluctuating responses of an organism under unforeseen circumstances. We can conceive an automaton dog that would bark at the presence of a beggar; but not of an automaton dog that would bark one day at the beggar and the next day wag his tail, remembering the food and patting that beggar had bestowed. Since all we know of machines forbids the idea of their being capable of adjusting their actions to new circumstances, or of evoking through experience new powers of combination, we conclude that wherever this capability of adaptation is present there is an agency in operation which does not belong to the class of mechanical agencies. Goltz has shown that a frog deprived of its brain manifests so much of vision as enables it to avoid obstacles—leaping to the right or to the left of a book placed in its path. This Professor Huxley regards as purely mechanical:—“Although the frog appears to have no sensation of light, visible objects act upon the motor mechanism of its body.” Should we not rather conclude that if the frog had no sensation, no such effect would follow? because although a machine might be constructed to respond to variations of light and shadows, none could be constructed (without Sensibility) to respond to the fluctuating conditions as an organism responds.[221] Were the reflex actions of the organism purely mechanical—i. e. involving none of those fluctuating adjustments which characterize Sensibility—the effect would be uniform, and proportional to the impact; but it is variable, and proportional to the static condition of the nervous centres at the moment. Exaggerate this—by strychnine, for instance—and the slightest touch on the skin will produce general convulsions. Lower it—by an anæsthetic—and no reflex at all will follow a stimulus. In anæsthesia of the mucous membrane, no reflex of the eyelid, no secretion of tears, follows on the irritation of the membrane; no sneezing follows irritation of the inside of the nose; no vomiting follows irritation of the fauces.
77. The question has long ceased to be whether the organism is a mechanism. To the physiologist it is this before all things. To the psychologist also it has of late years more and more assumed this character; because even when he postulates the existence of a spiritual entity in the organism but not of it, he still recognizes the necessity of a mechanism for the execution of the acts determined by the spirit; and when the psychologist adopts the theory of spiritual phenomena as the subjective aspect of what objectively are material phenomena, he of course regards the bodily mechanism and the mental mechanism as one and the same real.
This settled, the problem of Automatism may be thus stated: Granting the animal organism to be a material mechanism, and all its actions due to the operation of that mechanism, are we to conclude that it is an automaton essentially resembling the automata we construct, the movements of which may, or may not, be accompanied by Feeling, but are in no case determined by Feeling?
Descartes says that animals are sensitive automata. Professor Huxley says that both animals and men are sensitive and conscious automata; so that misleading as the language of Descartes and Professor Huxley often is in what its terms connote, we do them great injustice if we suppose them to have overlooked the points of difference between organisms and machines which have been set forth with so much emphasis in a preceding chapter; and the reader is requested to understand that without pretending to say how much the inevitable connotation of their language expresses their opinions, and how much it may have only led to their being misunderstood, my criticisms are directed against this connotation and this interpretation.
CHAPTER VII.
IS FEELING AN AGENT?
78. Descartes having attributed all animal actions to a sensitive mechanism, and indeed all human actions to a similar mechanism, endeavored to reconcile this hypothesis with the irresistible facts of Consciousness—which assured us that our actions, at least, were determined by Feeling. To this end he assumed that man had a spiritual principle over and above the sentient principle. The operation of this principle was, however, limited to Thought; the actions themselves were all performed by the automatic mechanism; so that, in strict logic, the conclusion from his premises was the same for man as for animals.
This conclusion Professor Huxley announced in his Address before the British Association, 1874[222]—to the great scandal of the general public, which did not understand him aright; and to the scandal also of a physiological public, which, strangely enough, failed to see that it was the legitimate expression of one of their favorite theories—the celebrated Reflex Theory. Now although it is quite open to any one to reject the premises which lead to such a conclusion, if he sees greater evidence against the conclusion than for the premises, it is surely irrational to accept the premises as those of scientific induction, and yet reject the conclusion because it endangers the stability of other opinions? For my own part, I do not accept the premises, and my polemic will have reference to them.
79. Professor Huxley adopts certain Theses which represent the views generally adopted by physiologists; to which he adds a Thesis which is adopted by few, and which he only puts forward hypothetically. Against these positions I place Antitheses, less generally adopted, but which in my belief approximate more nearly to the inductions of experience.
| Theses. | Antitheses. |
|---|---|
| I. There can be no sensation without consciousness. | I. There is sensation without consciousness, if consciousness means a special mode of Sentience. |
| II. There can be no consciousness without the co-operation of the brain. | II. The co-operation of the brain is only necessary for a special mode of Sentience; other modes are active when the brain is inactive. |
| III. Sensation and Consciousness are in some inexplicable way caused by molecular changes in the brain, following upon these as one event follows another, the causal link between motion and sensation being a mystery. | III. Unless the molecular changes be limited to the brain as the occasional cause, there is no following of sensation or motion, no causal link between the two; but the neural process is the sensation, viewed objectively, the sensation is the neural process, viewed subjectively. In this antithesis, Neural Process is not limited to the brain, but comprises the whole sensitive organism as the efficient cause. |
| IV. All actions which take place unconsciously are reflex, and reflex actions are the operation of an insentient mechanism; they are therefore as purely mechanical as those of automata. | IV. All actions are the actions of a reflex mechanism, and all are sentient, even when unconscious; they are therefore never purely mechanical, but always organical. |
| V. The animal body is a reflex mechanism; even when the brain co-operates with the other centres, and produces consciousness, this product is not an agent in determining action, it is a collateral result of the operation. | V. Sentience being necessary to reflex action, it is necessarily an agent. |
80. The first four Theses are those current in our textbooks, so that it is only the fifth which will have the air of a paradox. Nor, as a paradox, is it without advocates. Schiff long ago suggested it hypothetically. Hermann mentions it as entertained by physiologists, whom he does not name.[223] Laycock, and, if I remember rightly, Dr. Drysdale, have insisted on it; and Mr. Spalding has proclaimed it with iterated emphasis. Of the Antitheses nothing need be said here, since the whole of this volume is meant to furnish their evidence.
I have already stated that my polemic is against the views that Professor Huxley is supposed to hold by those whom his expressions mislead, rather than against the views I imagine him really to hold. I have little doubt that he would disavow much that I am forced to combat, although his language is naturally interpreted in that sense. But I do not know in how far he would agree with me, and in the following remarks I shall confine myself to what seems to be the plain interpretation of his words, since that is the interpretation which has been generally adopted, and which I most earnestly desire to refute.
81. To begin with this passage. After stating the views of Descartes, he says: “As actions of a certain degree of complexity are brought about by mere mechanism, why may not actions of still greater complexity be the result of a more refined mechanism? What proof is there that brutes are other than a superior race of marionnettes, which eat without pleasure, cry without pain, desire nothing, know nothing, and only simulate intelligence as a bee simulates a mathematician?” What proof? Why, in the first place, the proof which is implied in the “more refined mechanism” required for the greater complexity of actions. In the next place, the proof that the organism of the brute is very different from the mechanism of a marionnette, and is so much more like the organism of man, that since we know man to eat with pleasure and cry with pain, there is a strong presumption that the brute eats and cries with somewhat similar feelings.
82. Having stated the hypothesis, Professor Huxley says he is not disposed to accept it, though he thinks it cannot be refuted. His chief reason for not accepting it is that the law of continuity forbids the supposition of any complex phenomenon suddenly appearing; the community between animals and men is too close for us to admit that Consciousness could appear in man without having its beginnings in animals. Finding that animals have brains, he justly concludes that they also must have brain functions; and they also therefore must be credited with Consciousness. This argument seems to me to have irresistible cogency; and to be destructive not only of the automaton hypothesis, but equally of the hypothesis on which the Reflex Theory is founded. If the law of continuity forbids the sudden appearance of Consciousness, the law of similarity of property with similarity of structure forbids the supposition that central nerve-tissue in one part of the system can suddenly assume a totally different property in another part. If the brain of an animal, a bird, a reptile, or a fish—and a fortiori if the œsophageal ganglia of an insect or a mollusc—may be credited with Sensibility, because of the fundamental similarity of these structures with the structures of the human brain, then surely the spinal cord must be credited with Sensibility; for the tissue of the spinal cord is more like that of the brain, than the brain of a reptile is like the brain of a man. The sudden disappearance of all Sensibility, on the removal of one portion of the central nervous system, would be a violation of the law of continuity. And if it be said that Consciousness is not the same as Sensibility, but is a specially evolved function of a specially developed organ, the answer will be that this is only a difference of mode, and that the existence of Sensibility is that which renders the automaton and reflex theories untenable.
83. Professor Huxley would probably admit this; for however his language may at times seem to point to another conclusion, and is so far ambiguous, he has expressed the view here maintained with tolerable distinctness in the following passage, to which particular attention is called:—
“But though we may see reason to disagree with Descartes’ hypothesis, that brutes are unconscious machines, it does not follow that he was wrong in regarding them as automata. They may be more or less conscious sensitive automata; and the view that they are such conscious machines is that which is implicitly or explicitly adopted by most persons. When we speak of the actions of the lower animals being guided by instinct and not by reason, what we really mean is that though they feel as we do, yet their actions are the results of their physical organization. We believe, in short, that they are machines, one part of which (the nervous system) not only sets the rest in motion and co-ordinates its movements in relation with changes in surrounding bodies, but is provided with a special apparatus the function of which is the calling into existence of those states of consciousness which are termed sensations, emotions, and ideas.”
84. To say that they are “conscious automata” seems granting all that I demand; but there are two objectionable positions which the phrase conceals: first, that Consciousness is not a coefficient; and secondly, that Reflex Action is purely mechanical.
Professor Huxley nowhere, I think, establishes the distinction between Consciousness as a term for a special mode of Feeling, and Consciousness as the all-embracing term for sentient phenomena. His language always implies that an action performed unconsciously is performed mechanically; which may be acceptable if by unconsciously be meant insentiently. I hold that whether consciously or unconsciously performed, the action is equally vital and sentient. In the case he has cited of a soldier now living who is subject to periodic alternations of normal and abnormal states, in the latter states all the actions being said to be “unconscious,” we have only to read the account to recognize ample evidence of Sentience. Here is a descriptive passage:—
85. “His [the soldier’s in the abnormal state] movements remain free, and his expression calm, except for a contraction of the brow, an incessant movement of the eyeballs, and a chewing motion of the jaws. The eyes are wide open, and their pupils dilated. If the man happens to be in a place to which he is accustomed he walks about as usual; but if he is in a new place, or if obstacles are intentionally placed in his way, he stumbles against them, stops, and then feeling over the objects with his hands, passes on one side of them. He offers no resistance to any change of direction which may be impressed upon him, or to the forcible acceleration or retardation of his movements. He eats, drinks, smokes, walks about, dresses and undresses himself, rises and goes to bed at the accustomed hours. Nevertheless pins may be run into his body, or strong electric shocks sent through it, without causing the least indication of pain; no odorous substance, pleasant or unpleasant, makes the least impression; he eats and drinks with avidity whatever is offered, and takes asafœtida or vinegar of quinine as readily as water; no noise affects him; and light influences him only under certain conditions.”
There is no one of these phenomena that is unfamiliar to students of mental disease. The case is chiefly remarkable from the periodicity of the recurrence of the abnormal state. I have collected other cases of the kind, and may hereafter find a fitting occasion to quote them.[224] The anæsthesia and “unconsciousness” noted, no more prove the actions performed by this soldier to have been purely mechanical, i. e. undetermined by sensation, than anæsthesia and unconsciousness prove somnambulists and madmen to be machines. In the pathological state called “ecstasy” there is a considerable diminution of sensibility to external stimuli; with a concentration on certain feelings, images, trains of thought, exhibiting itself in expressions of emotion. “Les malades,” says a master, “paraissent entièrement absorbés par leurs mouvements intérieurs, ils refusent généralement de manger, et spécialement la volonté de l’âme semble complètement enchainée.”[225]
86. Observe that while this soldier exhibits such insensibility to certain stimuli, he unequivocally exhibits sensibility to other stimuli. All his acts show sense-guidance. Sight and Touch obviously regulate his movements. And when he feels objects placed in his way, and then passes beside them, wherein does this differ from the normal procedure of sensitive organisms? wherein does it resemble automata? Dr. Mesmet—from whose narrative the case is cited—remarks that the sense of Touch seems to persist “and indeed to be more acute and delicate than in the normal state”; upon which Professor Huxley has this comment:—“Here a difficulty arises. It is clear from the facts detailed that the nervous apparatus by which in the normal state sensations of touch are excited is that by which external influences determine the movements of the body in the abnormal state. But does the state of consciousness, which we term a tactile sensation, accompany the operation of this nervous apparatus in the abnormal state? or is consciousness utterly absent, the man being reduced to a pure mechanism? It is impossible to obtain direct evidence in favor of the one conclusion or the other; all that can be said is that the case of the frog shows that the man may be devoid of any kind of consciousness.”
87. It is here we are made vividly aware of the absolute need there is to disengage the terms employed from their common ambiguities. All the evidence of a tactile sensation which can possibly be furnished, on the objective side, is furnished by the actions of this soldier; to doubt it would be to throw a doubt on the sensibility of any animal unable to tell us what it felt; nay, even a man if he were dumb, or spoke a language we could not understand, could give us no other proof. We conclude that the soldier had tactile sensations, because we see him guided by them as we ourselves are guided by tactile sensations; we know that he is an organism, not a machine, and therefore reject the inference that he has become reduced to a “pure mechanism” because it is inferred that his consciousness is absent. And on what is this inference grounded? 1°, The belief that the brain is the sole organ of consciousness (Sentience)—a belief flatly disproved by the facts, which show Sentience when the brain has been removed; and 2°, the belief that the decapitated frog, because it avoids obstacles and redirects its leaps to avoid them, does so without Sentience. According to the definition we adopt, we may either say that the decapitated frog, and the soldier in his abnormal state, act without consciousness, or with it. But what does not seem permissible is to deny that their actions exhibit the clearest evidence of sense-guidance, and the kind of volition which this sense-guidance implies; and this is quite enough to separate them from actions of automata. When a man ducks his head to avoid a stone which he sees falling towards him, he assuredly has a sensation, i. e. there is a grouping of neural elements, which subjectively is a sensation, and this originates a grouping of other neural elements, the outcome of which is a muscular movement, which subjectively is a motor sensation: this grouping would not have been originated unless the particular grouping had preceded it; nor would the simple retinal stimulus have excited this sensation unless the nerve-centres had been attuned to such response by many previous experiences: the ignorant child would not duck its head on seeing the stone approach. In our familiar use of the word Consciousness it would be correct to say that the man ducks his head “unconsciously”; and yet expressing the fact in psychological language, we also say: He ducks his head because remembering the pain of former similar experiences, he knows that if the stone strikes him he will again be hurt as before, therefore he wills to avoid it; expressing it in physiological language we may say: The man acts thus because he is so organized that a particular neural process is the stimulus of a particular central discharge; and he became thus organized through a long series of anterior adjustments responding to stimuli, each adjustment being the activity of the vital organism.
88. There can be no doubt that the soldier had perceptions, and that these perceptions guided his movements; whether these shall be called “states of consciousness” or not, is a question of terms. Now since we know that certain actions are uniformly consequent on certain perceptions, we are justified in inferring that whenever the actions are performed, the perceptions preceded them: this inference may be erroneous, but in the absence of positive evidence to the contrary it is that which claims our first assent. Is it evidence to the contrary that the perception may have stimulated the action, yet been unaccompanied by the special mode named consciousness? Not in the least. We learn to read with conscious effort; each letter has to be apprehended separately, its form distinguished from all other forms, its value as a sign definitely fixed, yet how very rarely are we “conscious” of the letters when we read a book? Each letter is perceived; and yet this process passes so rapidly and smoothly, that unless there be some defect in a letter, or the word be misspelled, we are not “conscious” of the perceptions. Are we therefore reading automata?[226]
We are said to walk unconsciously at times; and the continuance of the movement is said to be due to reflex action. But it is demonstrable that the cutaneous sensibility of the soles of the feet is a primary condition. If the skin be insensible, the walking becomes a stumble. In learning to walk, or dance, the child fixes his eyes on his feet, as he fixes them on his fingers in learning to play the piano. After a while these registered sensations connected with the muscular sense suffice to guide his feet or his fingers; but not if feet or fingers lose their sensibility.
89. With these explanations let us follow the further details of this soldier’s abnormal actions:—
“The man is insensible to sensory impressions made through the ear, the nose, the tongue, and, to a great extent, the eye; nor is he susceptible to pain from causes operating during his abnormal state. Nevertheless it is possible so to act upon his tactile apparatus as to give rise to those molecular changes in his sensorium which are ordinarily the causes of associated trains of ideas. I give a striking example of this process in Dr. Mesmet’s words: ‘Il se promenait dans le jardin, on lui remet sa canne qu’il avait laissé tomber. Il la palpe, promène à plusieurs reprises la main sur la poignée coudée de sa canne—devient attentif—semble prêter l’oreille—et tout à coup appelle, “Henri! les voilà!” Et alors portant la main derrière son dos comme pour prendre une cartouche, il fait le mouvement de charger son arme, se couche dans l’herbe à plat ventre dans la position d’un tirailleur, et suit avec l’arme épaulée tous les mouvements de l’ennemi qu’il croit voir à courte distance.’ In a subsequent abnormal period Dr. Mesmet caused the patient to repeat this scene by placing him in the same conditions. Now in this case the question arises whether the series of actions constituting this singular pantomime was accompanied by the ordinary states of consciousness, the appropriate trains of ideas, or not? Did the man dream that he was skirmishing? or was he in the condition of one of Vaucanson’s automata—a mechanism worked by molecular changes in the nervous system? The analogy of the frog shows that the latter assumption is perfectly justifiable.”
90. Before criticising this conclusion let me adduce other illustrations of this dreamlike activity. “A gentleman whom I attended in a state of perfect apoplexy,” says Abercrombie, “was frequently observed to adjust his nightcap with the utmost care when it got into an uncomfortable state: first pulling it down over his eyes, and then turning up the front of it in the most exact manner.” According to the current teaching, these actions, which seem like evidence of sensation, are nothing of the kind, because—the patient was “unconscious”; that is to say, because he did not exhibit one complex kind of Sensibility, it is denied that he exhibited another kind! he did not feel discomfort, nor feel the movements by which it was rectified—because he could not speak, discuss impersonal questions, nor attend to what was said to him! Abercrombie cites other cases: “A gentleman who was lying in a state of perfect insensibility from disease of the brain” (note the phrase, which really only expresses the fact that external stimuli did not create their normal reactions) “was frequently observed even the day before his death to take down a repeating watch from a little bag at the head of his bed, put it close to his ear and make it strike the hour, and then replace it in the bag with the greatest precision. Another whom I saw in a state of profound apoplexy, from which he recovered, had a perfect recollection of what took place during the attack, and mentioned many things which had been said in his hearing when he was supposed to be in a state of perfect unconsciousness.” Dr. Wigan also tells of a lady whom he knew, and who was actually put in a coffin, under the belief that she was dead when in a trance. Her sense of hearing was then preternaturally acute. In her second-floor bedroom she heard what the servants said in her kitchen. When her brother came to see her and he declared she should not be buried until putrefaction set in, she felt intense gratitude and a gush of tenderness, but was unable to move even an eyelid as a manifestation of her feeling. Suddenly all her faculties returned. Dr. Wigan adds that he visited the Countess Escalante, one of the Spanish refugees, who remained in a similar state for a short period, during which she saw her husband and children, and was quite conscious of all they did and said—but did not recognize them as her own. She was absolutely without the power of moving a finger or of opening her mouth. Dr. Neil Arnott told me of a similar case in his practice. In these last cases we learn that consciousness—in its ordinary acceptation—was present, though bystanders could see no trace of it. And very often in cases where Consciousness, or at any rate Sensibility, is clearly manifested, its presence is denied, because the patient on recovering his normal condition is quite unable to remember anything that he felt and did. Under anæsthetics patients manifest sensation, but on awaking they declare that they felt nothing—of what value is their declaration? M. Despine tells us of a patient who under chloroform struggled, swore, and cried out, “Mon Dieu! que je souffre!” yet when the operation was over, and he emerged from the effects of the chloroform, he remembered nothing of what he had felt.[227]
91. Returning now to Dr. Mesmet’s soldier, and to the conclusion that his dreamlike acts were no more than the actions of one of Vaucanson’s automata, surely we are justified in concluding, first, that these actions were not of the same kind as those of an automaton, since they were those of a living organism; secondly, that they present all the evidence positive and inferential which Sensibility can present in the actions we observe in another, and do not feel in ourselves; and thirdly, if with physiologists we agree that the mechanism of these actions is “worked by molecular changes in the nervous system,” there is some difficulty in understanding how Consciousness, which is said to be caused by such changes, could have been absent—how the cause could operate yet no effect be produced.
92. What automata can be made to perform is surprising enough, but they can never be made to display the fluctuations of sense-guided actions, such as we see in the report of Dr. Mesmet’s soldier:—
“The ex-sergeant has a good voice, and had at one time been employed as a singer at a café. In one of his abnormal states he was observed to begin humming a tune. He then went to his room, dressed himself carefully, and took up some parts of a periodical novel which lay on the bed, as if he were trying to find something. Dr. Mesmet, suspecting that he was seeking his music, made up one of these into a roll and put it into his hand. He appeared satisfied, took up his cane, and went down stairs to the door. Here Dr. Mesmet turned him round, and he walked quite contentedly in the opposite direction. The light of the sun shining through a window happened to fall upon him, and seemed to suggest the footlights of the stage on which he was accustomed to make his appearance. He stopped, opened his roll of imaginary music, put himself in the attitude of a singer, and sang with perfect execution three songs one after the other. After which he wiped his face with his handkerchief and drank without a grimace a tumbler of strong vinegar-and-water.”
93. Epileptic patients have frequently been observed going through similar dreamlike actions in which only those external stimuli which have a relation to the dream seem to take effect.[228] We interpret these as phenomena of disordered mental action, the burden of proof lies on him who says they are phenomena of pure mechanism. A mail-coach does not suddenly cease to be a mail-coach and become a wheelbarrow because the coachman is drunk, or has fallen from the box. The horses, no longer guided by the reins, may dash off the highroad into gardens or ditches; but it is their muscular exertions which still move the coach.
Can any one conceive an automaton acting as the sergeant is described to be in the following passage?—
“Sitting at a table he took up a pen, felt for paper and ink, and began to write a letter to his general, in which he recommended himself for a medal on account of his good conduct and courage. It occurred to Dr. Mesmet to ascertain experimentally how far vision was concerned in this act of writing. He therefore interposed a screen between the man’s eyes and his hands; under these circumstances he went on writing for a short time, but the words became illegible, and he finally stopped. On the withdrawal of the screen, he began to write again where he had left off. The substitution of water for ink in the inkstand had a similar result. He stopped, looked at his pen, wiped it on his coat, dipped it in the water, and began again, with the same effect. On one occasion he began to write upon the topmost of ten superposed sheets of paper. After he had written a line or two, this sheet was suddenly drawn away. There was a slight expression of surprise, but he continued his letter on the second sheet exactly as if it had been the first. This operation was repeated five times, so that the fifth sheet contained nothing but the writer’s signature at the bottom of the page. Nevertheless, when the signature was finished, his eyes turned to the top of the blank sheet, and he went through the form of reading over what he had written, a movement of the lips accompanying each word; moreover, with his pen he put in such corrections as were needed.”
94. Dr. Mesmet concludes that “his patient sees some things and not others; that the sense of sight is accessible to all things which are brought into relation with him by the sense of touch, and, on the contrary, is insensible to things which lie outside this relation.” In other words, the sensitive mechanism acts, but acts abnormally. This is precisely what is observed in somnambulists. Yet Professor Huxley, who makes the comparison, appears to regard both states as those in which the organism is reduced to a mere mechanism, because on recovering their normal state the patients are unconscious of what has passed; and because the frog, without its brain, also manifests analogous phenomena. Neither premise warrants the conclusion. I have already touched on the unconsciousness of past actions; let me add the case of Faraday, who was assuredly not an automaton when he prepared and delivered a course of lectures which were nevertheless so entirely obliterated from his memory that the next year he prepared and delivered the same course once more, without a suspicion that it was not a new one. As to the frog, I must leave that case till I come to examine the evidence on which the hypothesis of the purely mechanical nature of spinal action rests.
95. The point never to be left out of sight is that actions which are known to be preceded and accompanied by sensations do not lose their special character of Sentience, as actions of a sentient mechanism, because they are not also preceded and accompanied by that peculiar state which is specially called Consciousness, i. e. attention to the passing changes (comp. p. 403). When we see a man playing the piano, and at the same time talking of something far removed from the music, we say his fingers move unconsciously; but we do not conclude that he is a musical machine—muscular sensations and musical sensations regulate every movement of his fingers; and if he strikes a false note, or if one of the notes jangles, he is instantly conscious of the fact. Either we must admit that his brain is an essential part of the mechanism by which the piano was played, and its function an essential agent in the playing; or else we must admit that the brain and its function were not essential, and therefore the playing would continue if the brain were removed. In the latter case, we should have a musical automaton. That a particular group of sensations, such as musical tones, will set going a particular group of muscular movements, without the intervention of any conscious effort, is not more to be interpreted on purely mechanical principles, than that a particular phrase will cause a story-teller to repeat a familiar anecdote, or an old soldier “to fight his battles o’er again.”
96. Let us now pass to another consideration, namely, whether Consciousness—however interpreted—is legitimately conceived as a factor in the so-called conscious and voluntary actions; or is merely a collateral result of certain organic activities? To answer this, we must first remember that Consciousness is a purely subjective process; although we may believe it to be objectively a neural process, we are nevertheless passing out of the region of Physiology when we speak of Feeling determining Action. Motion may determine Motion; but Feeling can only determine Feeling. Yet we do so speak, and are justified. For thereby we implicitly declare, what Psychology explicitly teaches, namely, that these two widely different aspects, objective and subjective, are but the two faces of one and the same reality. It is thus indifferent whether we say a sensation is a neural process, or a mental process: a molecular change in the nervous system, or a change in Feeling. It is either, and it is both, as I have elsewhere explained.[229] There it was argued that the current hypothesis of a neural process causing the mental process—molecular movement being in some mysterious way transformed into sensation—is not only inconceivable, but altogether unnecessary; whereas the hypothesis that the two aspects of the one phenomenon are simply two different expressions, now in terms of Matter and Motion, and now in terms of Consciousness, is in harmony with all the inductive evidence.
97. “It may be assumed,” says Professor Huxley, “that molecular changes in the brain are the causes of all the states of consciousness of brutes. Is there any evidence that these states of consciousness may conversely cause those molecular changes which give rise to muscular motion? I see no such evidence. The frog walks, hops, swims, and goes through his gymnastic performances, quite as well without consciousness, and consequently without volition, as with it; and if a frog in his natural state possesses anything corresponding with what we call volition, there is no reason to think that it is anything but a concomitant of the molecular changes in the brain, which form part of the series involved in the production of motion. The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes.” Particular attention is called to the passages in italics. In the first is expressed a view which seems not unlike the one I am advocating, but which is contradicted by the second. Let us consider what is implied.
98. When Consciousness is regarded solely under its subjective aspect there is obviously no place for it among material agencies, regarded as objective. So long as we have the material mechanism in view we have nothing but material changes. This applies to the frog, with or without its brain; to man, supposed to be moved by volition, or supposed to move automatically. The introduction of Consciousness is not the introduction of another agent in the series, but of a new aspect; the neural process drops out of sight, the mental process replaces it. The question whether we have any ground for inferring that in the series there is included the particular neural state which subjectively is a state of Consciousness, must be answered according to the evidence. Well, the evidence shows that the actions do involve the co-operation; and this Professor Huxley expresses when he says that the molecular changes in the brain form part of the series involved in the production of motion. Whether we regard the process objectively as a series of molecular changes, or subjectively as a succession of sentient changes, the sum of which is on the one side a motor impulse, on the other a state of consciousness, we must declare Consciousness to be an agent, in the same sense that we declare one change in the organism to be an agent in some other change. The facts are the same, whether we express them in physiological or in psychological terms. The physiologist, having only the material aspect of the organism in view, says, “A cerebral process initiates a motor process”; the psychologist says, “A sensation determines an action.” Unless the two processes have been linked together by an organic disposition, native or acquired, there will be no such motor process following the cerebral process. A dog standing outside the gate is unable to ring the bell, though having seen another dog ring it, he may wish to do so; but the cerebral process (his wish) is not linked on to the needful motor process—he has not learned to realize the wish; whereas the other dog, having by trial hit upon the right mode of directing his muscles, has registered this experience, and can ring the bell. The organized disposition which enables the dog to do this may truly enough be called a modification of the mechanism; but what we have here to note is that a sensation originally determined the movement, and always determines it.
99. It is the unfortunate ambiguity of the word Consciousness, and the questionable hypothesis of the brain being the sole seat of Sensibility, which darken this investigation. Because animals, after the brain has been removed, are seen to perform certain actions as deftly as before, they are said to perform these without the intervention of Consciousness; when all that is proved by the facts is that these actions are performed without the intervention of the brain. In support of this explanation, examples are cited of unconscious actions performed by human beings. But if we assign Sensibility not to one part of the nervous system exclusively, but to the whole, we can readily understand how the loss of a part will be manifested by very marked changes in the reactions of the whole, and yet not altogether prevent the reactions of the parts remaining intact. An animal must respond somewhat differently with and without a brain. One marked difference is the spontaneity of the actions when the brain is intact, and the loss of much spontaneity when the brain is injured or removed. Cerebral processes prompt and regulate actions, as the pressure of the driver on the reins prompts and regulates the movements of the horses; but the carriage is moved by the horses and not by the driver; and the action is executed by the motor mechanism, whether the incitation arise in a cerebral process or a peripheral stimulation.
100. If we admit that Consciousness is itself an organic process, accompanying the molecular changes as a convex surface accompanies a concave, we must also admit that its fluctuations are adjustments and readjustments of the organic mechanism, and that the actions are the effects of these—their resultants. The loss of the brain must obviously cause a great disturbance in these adjustments. We may call that a loss of Consciousness, if we choose to limit the term to one mode of sentient reaction. But this loss of a mode does not change those reactions which persist so as to convert them into purely mechanical reactions. A troop of soldiers may have lost its directing officer, but will fight with the old weapons and the old intelligence, though not with the same convergence of individual efforts. A frog or a pigeon no more acts as well without a brain as with a brain, than the troop of soldiers fights as well without an officer.
101. Having thus claimed a place for Consciousness in the series of organic processes, let us now see whether it has a place among the active agencies. According to Professor Huxley it is not itself an agent, but only the “collateral product of the working of the machine.” It accompanies actions, it does not direct them. It is an index, not a cause.
Surely it seems more accurate to say that it accompanies and directs the working? It accompanies the working in two senses: first, as the subjective aspect of the objective process; secondly, as the change which produces a subsequent change, that is to say, the movements initiated by a feeling are themselves also felt as they pass; and this feeling enters into the general stream of simultaneous excitations out of which new movements and feelings arise; or to express it physiologically, the sensory impressions determine muscular movements, which in turn react on the nerve-centres, and these reactions blend with the general excitation of reflected and re-reflected processes.[230] Since every change in Consciousness is a change in the sentient organism, which objectively is a change in the nervous centres, the working of the mechanism being itself a dependent series of such changes, each movement must have a reflected influence on the general state. This reflected influence may be viewed as a collateral product of the working; but there is no real analogy between it and the whistle of the steam-engine, because this reflected influence demonstrably does intervene in the subsequent movements. The feeling which accompanies or follows a particular movement cannot indeed modify that movement, since that is already set going, or has passed; here there is some analogy to the steam-whistle; but the analogy fails in the subsequent history: no movements whatever of the steam-engine are modified by the whistle which accompanies the working of that engine; yet how the reflected influence modifies the working of the organism! If the hand be passing over a surface, there is, accompanying this movement, a succession of muscular and tactile feelings which may be said to be collateral products. But the feeling which accompanies one muscular contraction is itself the stimulus of the next contraction; if anywhere during the passage the hand comes upon a spot on the surface which is wet or rough, the change in feeling thus produced, although a collateral product of the movement, instantly changes the direction of the hand, suspends or alters the course—that is to say, the collateral product of one movement becomes a directing factor in the succeeding movement. Now this is precisely what no automaton can effect, unless for changes that are prearranged. A steam-engine drives its locomotive over the rails, be they smooth or rough, entire or broken; it whistles as it goes, but no whistling directs and redirects its path.
102. Volition is said to be an “emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes.” Here it is necessary to understand in what sense the term cause is employed. I should prefer stating the proposition thus: a volition is a state of the sentient organism, indicative of physical changes which have taken place, and of changes which will take place. Because it is the expression of the first group of changes, it cannot be their origin; but it can be, and is the origin of the second group, which it initiates. The indignation excited by an insult or a blow is not the origin of the emotion or the pain, but it is the origin of the actions which are prompted by this sentient state. In fact no sooner do we admit that the organism is a sentient mechanism, than the conclusion is irresistible that Sensibility is a factor in the working of that mechanism.
103. “Much ingenious argument,” says Professor Huxley, “has at various times been bestowed upon the question: How is it possible to imagine that volition which is a state of consciousness, and as such has not the slightest community of nature with matter and motion, can act upon the moving matter of which the body is composed, as it is assumed to do in voluntary acts? But if, as is here suggested, the voluntary acts of brutes—or in other words, the acts which they desire to perform—are as purely mechanical as the rest of their actions, and are simply accompanied by the state of consciousness called volition, the inquiry, so far as they are concerned, becomes superfluous. Their volitions do not enter into the chain of causation of their actions at all.... As consciousness is brought into existence only as the consequence of molecular motion in the brain, it follows that it is an indirect product of material changes. The soul stands related to the body as the bell of a clock to the works, and consciousness answers to the sound which the bell gives out when it is struck.” This has been answered in the foregoing pages; nor do I think the reader who has recognized the ambiguity of the term Consciousness, and the desirability of replacing it in this discussion by the less equivocal term Sentience, will need more to be said.
104. The important question whether reflex actions are insentient, and therefore mechanical, will occupy us in the next problem. The question of Automatism which has been argued in the preceding chapters, may, I think, be summarily disposed of by a reference to the irresistible evidence each man carries in his own consciousness that his actions are frequently—even if not always—determined by feelings. He is quite certain that he is not an automaton, and that his feelings are not simply collateral products of his actions, without the power of modifying and originating them. Now this fundamental fact cannot be displaced by any theoretical explanation of its factors. Nor would this fundamental truth be rendered doubtful, even supposing we were to grant to the full all that is adduced as evidence that some actions were the result of purely mechanical processes without sentience at all. I am a conscious organism, even if it be true that I sometimes act unconsciously. I am not a machine, even if it be true that I sometimes act mechanically.
PROBLEM IV.
THE REFLEX THEORY.
“Si omnes patres sic, et Ego non sic.”—Abelard, Sic et Non.
“Will man bestimmen wo der Mechanismus aufhört und wo der Wille anfängt so ist die Frage überhaupt falsch gestellt. Denn man setzt hier Begriffe einander gegenüber die gar keine Gegensätze sind. Vorgebildet in den mechanischen Bedingungen des Nervensystems sind alle Bewegungen.”—Wundt, Physiologische Psychologie.
“Sollte die so durchsichtige Homologie zwischen Hirn and Rückenmark, wie solche sich schlagend in Bau und Entwicklung darthut, wesentlich andere physiologische Qualitäten bedingen?”—Luschinger in Pflüger’s Archiv, Bd. XIV. 384.